Corbyn, Labour , Anti-Semitism, the IHRA definition, Wreathgate & Irony-Gate ; Propaganda, Double Standards and Hypocrisy

Summary

There have been a small minority of Labour members who have said anti-Semitic things; and the party was not quick enough to discipline them for it. But anti-Semitism is not widespread in the Labour party or on the left though. Research by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in 2017 found under 6% of people on the far left in the UK have anti-Semitic views.

Many of the people accused by Corbyn’s critics of anti-Semitism are Jewish. Some are Israeli military veterans like Miko Peled. Others Holocaust survivors like Hajo Meyer, or their children like Norman Finkelstein, or grandchildren of Holocaust victims like Gerald Kaufmann MP. Accusing them, or anyone agreeing with them, of anti-Semitism, is ludicrous. And many of the accusations against Corbyn and Labour have been false.

The IHRA examples would label them anti-Semites for comparing any Israeli government or military action to any action of the Nazis; along with anyone calling Israel a racist state, which would include Bishop Desmond Tutu. Labour adopted the definition plus 7 of 11 examples, rewording four relating to Israel – and adding a twelfth.

The IHRA definition and examples were written up for an EU body which saw them as only for discussion and debate and dropped them in 2013. Kenneth S. Stern, who drafted them, says they’re being misused to prevent free speech on Israel in a “McCarthy-like” way. (Credit to Jewish Voice For Labour and Free Speech on Israel for bringing these facts to light. They have also suggested a much clearer definition of anti-Semitism)

Joanna Phillips , a Jewish student group leader, has also pointed to the IHRA definition being mis-used to label the BDS movement anti-Semitic. BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) campaign to boycott Israeli products until Palestinians are given their own state alongside Israel.

The MacPherson principle is also being misquoted to claim any allegation of anti-Semitism by any Jewish person must be treated as anti-Semitism. MacPherson only said it should be investigated as a potential racist crime. Otherwise it would destroy the principle of innocent until proven guilty.

Photo: Gerald Kaufmann MP in 2003

The outrage over Corbyn attending a ceremony in Arabic at which civilian victims of a 1985 Israeli airstrike were honoured along with two senior PLO officials involved in planning the Munich terrorist murders shows massive double standards and hypocrisy.

In 2004 Jack Straw laid a wreath at PLO head Yasser Arafat’s funeral. In 2014 Tony Blair and the UK Foreign Secretary laid wreaths at the funeral of Ariel Sharon, one of the greatest mass murderers  and war criminals in the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who led the 1953 Qibya massacre ; allowed the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres ; and oversaw the targeted killing of civilians in 2002 in the West Bank in Operation Defensive Shield.

In 2006 Benjamin Netanyahu attended a ceremony to honour the Zionist terrorists of the Irgun group who bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 when Palestine was under British rule, killing 91 people. Also attending was Yitzakh Shamir, a former leader of the Lehi Zionist terrorist group who killed many civilians in terrorist attacks, including UN envoy Folke Bernadotte. Netanyahu began in politics as Shamir’s spokesperson when Shamir was Israeli Prime Minister.

(Medhi Hasan has also pointed out all the actual anti-Semites that Netanyahu is happy to associate with so long as they don’t criticise Israel or his government and military’s actions)

Theresa May’s Conservative UK government continues to arm governments and militaries who committ war crimes against civilians, including deliberately targeting them, including Israel’s and the Saudi dictatorship’s.

Reports from Amnesty Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem show Israeli forces regularly target Palestinian civilians. The same groups say the British armed Saudi air force has repeatedly targeted civilians including children in Yemen, yet the Saudis continue to receive British arms sales, political support and RAF advisors.

Photo: Yemeni schoolboys dig graves for their classmates killed in a Saudi airstrike on their school bus

The majority of accusations of anti-Semitism against Corbyn and Labour are his political enemies crying wolf by presenting criticism of Israel as if it was prejudice against all Jewish people.

There is no way for instance that Corbyn would use the word Zionists to mean Jews when he has shared platforms with many anti-Zionist Jews like Hajo Meyer.

New Labour within the Labour party want rid of him for criticising them (especially over the Iraq war which he voted against) , because his policies differ from theirs; and because New Labour MPs want their candidates to win in elections to Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee so they can scrap democracy within the party now it’s not working in their favour and side-line party members (the majority of who support left wing policies) again. Even if that fails they hope to lose Labour under Corbyn another General Election so they can say he has to go then.  

The Conservatives are happy to damage their main rival, Labour.

Pro-Israel groups want to get rid of a senior politician who backs a Palestinian state alongside Israel and has criticised Israel and sided with its critics and enemies.

This is not a dispute between Jews and non-Jews , but between critics of Israel and those who oppose allowing any serious criticism of its actions. A significant minority of Jewish people agree with Corbyn and Labour that the IHRA examples need amended to allow for criticism of Israel. For example the Jewish Voice for Labour group,  author and Corbyn supporter Michael Rosen , the Free Speech on Israel group and comedian David Baddiel (althoughhe’s  not generally a fan of Corbyn’s). Forty Jewish groups from around the world have also issued a joint statement saying that calling Israel racist is not anti-Semitism .

As Norman Finkelstein has pointed out neither Jews nor Zionist Jews are threatened or marginalised groups in the UK. They both have plenty of representation in parliament and the media, with anti-Semitism seen as unacceptable by the vast majority of British people – and there is far more prejudice against other minorities.

The demands that Labour adopt all the IHRA examples on Israel are Corbyn’s enemies demanding he put his head – and much of the left’s – in a noose, so they can pull it tight.

There are some Anti-Semites in the Labour party
but they’re a small minority

First, yes, there has been some anti-Semitism in the Labour party. Naz Shah MP’s “The Jews are rallying” facebook post was anti-Semitic. Though the attached map suggesting “Solution for Israel-Palestine conflict - relocate Israel into United States” was actually made by Norman Finkelstein, an American Jewish academic whose mother was a Holocaust survivor – and is mocking the line “Jordan is Palestine” suggesting all Palestinians should go and live in Jordan, which is pushed by many hardline Zionist groups (1) – (2).

Labour council candidate Naz Khan’s facebook post saying “Jews have reaped the rewards of playing victims…What good have Jews done in this world” and even that it was “a shame” that “history teachers…are brainwashing…children… into thinking the bad guy was Hitler” was blatant anti-Semitism. But she was banned by the party from being a candidate and left it (3).

Yes, Labour was too slow to discipline them ; and shouldn’t have had to wait for media coverage first.

Labour does not have more anti-Semitism than other parties though, nor is anti-Semitism widespread among Labour party members or Corbyn supporters,  nor the majority of people in the UK. The Institute for Jewish Policy Research found in a 2017 report that “levels of antisemitism in Great Britain are among the lowest in the world”. It also found that while the percentage of anti-Semites among people on the left and far left rose slightly – to 5.9% on the far left vs 4% among people with centrist views;  it is far more common on the right with 7% of those describing themselves as fairly right wing having anti-Semitic views and 17% of those on the far right. Over 80% of people describing themselves as right wing said they were Conservative or UKIP voters (4).

There is even some evidence to suggest that Labour has less anti-Semitic supporters than other major parties – and that the percentage may have fallen under Corbyn’s leadership.

A cross party Parliamentary Home Affairs Committee also concluded in a unanimously approved report in 2016  that there was no evidence of there being higher levels of anti-Semitism in the Labour party than other major parties (5).

That is not the impression you would get from certain politicians and some of the media.

And many of the headlines about “anti-Semitism” have been very misleading.

The Phony Accusations of Anti-Semitism –
Conflating it with criticism of Israel

Photo: Miko Peled

Many of the people accused by Corbyn’s critics of anti-Semitism are Jewish. Some of them Israeli military veterans. Others Holocaust survivors, their children or their grandchildren.

For instance the first major “anti-Semitic” incident reported involved Miko Peled, a Jewish born Israeli, son of an Israeli general, and Israeli Defence Forces veteran. He has come to oppose the existence of the state of Israel, believing in a “one state solution” in which everyone living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank would be given equal citizenship in a single state of Palestine.

At a fringe event at the 2017 Labour party conference he also suggested there should be absolute free speech, with even whether the Holocaust happened or not being something that could be debated (6).

Personally I disagree with him on both points, but can anyone seriously believe that he is motivated by anti-Semitism. i.e prejudice or hatred against Jewish people for being Jewish?

Then there’s the late Hajo Meyer, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp. He was the main speaker at an event on Holocaust Remembrance Day which Corbyn attended and helped organise in 2010 labelled “anti-Semitic” by Corbyn’s critics. Meyer compared Israeli state ideology and some actions of the Israeli government and military to those of the Nazis. Its title was ‘Never Again For Anyone : From Auschwitz to Gaza’ (7). 

Again some people may disagree with what Meyer said. But can anyone seriously believe he was motivated by prejudice or hatred against Jewish people?

And is Peled saying there should be a one state solution the same as saying Israel “should be destroyed” (implying Israeli Jews killed or forced to leave)? Clearly not.

Photo: Hajo Meyer

Daily Mail columnist Dan Hodges gave a Sky News interview in which he amazingly claimed that Meyer was not anti-Semitic, but that Corbyn was for attending the event, which qualified as anti-Semitic under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s definition of anti-Semitism, some of whose “examples” (not the definition itself) claim comparing contemporary Israeli actions to those of the Nazis is anti-Semitism.

This ludicrous 1984 style Double Think is popular among Corbyn’s most vociferous critics, despite it being a logical impossibility. Either a point of view is anti-Semitic, or it is not. It cannot be not anti-Semitic when a Jewish Holocaust survivor says it, but anti-Semitic if a non-Jew agrees with it, or attends an event at which it is said.

It’s even more amazing when you find out that the IHRA’s definition and examples of anti-Semitism were originally drawn up for an EU body , purely for debate and discussion, by Jewish activists from around the world. And that the EU agency dropped them from its website in 2013 due to concerns they were being misused. This did not stop former New Labour MP Denis Macshane writing an article excoriating Corbyn for “rejecting the EU’s definition of anti-Semitism” 5 years after the EU repudiated it, nor The Independent publishing it (8) – (9).

What’s more Kenneth S. Stern, one of the main drafters of the definition, Jewish and a self-described Zionist, says that the definition is too vague and that it is being misused to prevent free speech on Israel. He described its use to ban “Israeli Apartheid Week” at some UK universities as “anti-Semitic” as “chilling” and “McCarthy-like” (10).

So either the EU and yet another Jewish person (this time a Zionist adamant in his support for Israel’s right to exist) are yet more anti-Semites motivated by prejudice and hatred against Jewish people. Or else the entire saga of trying to redefine anti-Semitism as comparing any actions of the State of Israel to those of the Nazis , and calling the state of Israel a racist endeavour, are just a ludicrous propaganda campaign.

Photo:Kenneth S. Stern

Joanna Phillips , a Jewish student group leader, has also pointed to the IHRA definition being mis-used to label the BDS movement anti-Semitic. BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) campaign to boycott Israeli products until Palestinians are given their own state alongside Israel; along with encouraging companies to end investment in Israel and governments to place sanctions on it to put pressure on the Israeli government to offer a viable, sovereign Palestinian state.

The late Gerald Kaufmann MP, Jewish, and whose grandmother was killed by the Nazis, also compared Israeli forces’ actions in Gaza to those of the Nazis in World war Two (11).

Yet the IHRA examples would label Kaufmann an anti-Semite.

Similarly they could label Bishop Desmond Tutu an anti-Semite for calling Israel “an Apartheid state” (i.e a racist state). And Norman Finkelstein, the adopted son of Holocaust survivors, for his books noting some parallels between some actions and ideology of the Nazis and those of the Israeli government and military (12).

Photo: Norman Finkelstein

These two examples and another two were re-written in the Labour party’s rules against anti-semitism, not “omitted” as much of the media has claimed. They adopted the definition itself and seven other IHRA examples without any disagreement (13).

Here is the IHRA definition “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

No wonder Stern thinks this is too vague. He also says it was intended to be a starting point to look at particular cases that *might* meet these criteria, to see if they were actually anti-Semitic.

The misuse of his definition and examples is similar to pro-Israel groups’ distortion of the much misquoted MacPherson principle from his report on the Stephen Lawrence case. Many Jewish hard-line Zionists and their supporters,  who object to any criticism of Israel as “anti-Semitic”, say it must be treated as such if they perceive it to be, because that is the MacPherson principle on racist crimes. But MacPherson actually said that any case perceived by the person reporting it as racist should be investigated by police as a potential racist crime to see if there was evidence of racism. Otherwise anyone accused of any kind of race hate crime would be automatically guilty without any investigation or trial, which would be ludicrous and destroy the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.

Even the CST – a Jewish group highly critical of Corbyn’s supposed tolerance for anti-Semitism, noted in it’s own 2009 report that subjective perceptions of anti-Semitism don’t always objectively equal anti-Semitism (14).

None of this stops the propagandists referring to the IHRA definition as the “EU definition” and the “internationally recognised definition” of anti-Semitism. Nor demanding anything that any Jewish person or group labels anti-Semitism be treated as such.

Wreathgate
– Corbyn & the Munich Olympics Murders
And dozens of his critics
& the mass murderers & terrorists
they honoured (and armed)

Next there’s Wreathgate – the outrage over Jeremy Corbyn, as a backbench MP in October 2014, having attended a ceremony honouring dead Palestinians and aimed at reconciling rival and warring Palestinian factions – particularly Hamas and Fatah. Corbyn was there primarily to commemorate the victims of a 1985 Israeli airstrike on the PLO headquarters in Tunis, Tunisia, which killed 47 people, many of them civilians. A wreath was also laid at the graves of two senior PLO officials buried in the same cemetery, who had not taken part in the brutal terrorist murders of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, but were accused of having organised them. They denied these claims, though the website of Fatah (Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas’ party and the largest in the PLO) seems to say they were involved in organising that attack The website is in Arabic though, and so, most likely, was the ceremony (15).

Assuming Corbyn knew the latter were being honoured, and if he knew what they had done, then he could probably be legitimately criticised.

However that would also mean a lot of other politicians from the New Labour wing of the Labour party, the Conservative party and Israeli politicians – including Benjamin Netanyahu – would have to be condemned as much and in some cases a lot more.

For instance then Labour Foreign Secretary Jack Straw MP  laid a wreath at the funeral of Yasser Arafat in 2004. Arafat was a leader of the PLO and its largest member group Fatah for decades, responsible for many terrorist attacks which over the decades must have killed a significant number of civilians (16).

In June 2014, just a few months before the ceremony Corbyn attended, Tony Blair and then Conservative Foreign Minister Hugh Robertson laid wreaths at the funeral of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, one of the greatest mass murderers of the entire Israeli Palestinian conflict (17).

 Sharon was a member of the Haganah, the largest of the Zionist militias and terrorist groups that existed before the end of the 1948 war which established the state of Israel. While they mostly avoided terrorist attacks on the British that killed anyone, the Haganah were involved in multiple massacres of Palestinian Arab civilians during that war. For instance in the Abu Shusha Massacre Haganah forces massacred around 70 civilians, raping some of the women first and the Saliha massacre.

As an Israeli military (IDF) officer Sharon personally led and took part in the massacre of the entire population of the Jordanian village of Qibya in 1953.

In 1982 as Israeli Defence Minister he ordered IDF forces to allow far right Christian Lebanese militiamen into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, knowing that they would massacre the thousands of Palestinian civilians who remained in them as PLO fighters left for Tunisia under a ceasefire deal. An Israeli government inquiry – the Kahan Commission – found him personally responsible.

In 2002, as Prime Minister of Israel, Sharon oversaw Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank. Investigations by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and B’Tselem found that during it Israeli forces targeted civilians and ambulance crews ; bulldozed houses knowing civilians were still inside them; and forced Palestinian civilians to walk ahead of them at gunpoint as human shields. The estimated number killed was around 500 (18) – (22).

Photo: Victims of the Shatila Massacre, Lebanon, 1982

Then there’s Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, who condemned Corbyn’s attendance of the Tunis ceremony. He himself attended a ceremony in 2006 to honour the terrorists who bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. The bombers were members of the Irgun Zionist terrorist group led by Menachim Begin, who went on to be elected Prime Minister of Israel, invade Lebanon and oversee various war crimes. (23) – (24).

(Medhi Hasan has also pointed out all the actual anti-Semites that Netanyahu is happy to associate with so long as they don’t criticise Israel or his government and military’s actions.)

This ceremony was one of many honouring past Zionist terrorist attacks and celebrations of more recent Israeli settler murders of Palestinian civilians  (25).

Also present was former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzakh Shamir. Netanyahu started his political career as Shamir’s Ambassador to the UN and spokesman to the English speaking foreign media. Shamir had been one of the leaders of the Lehi Zionist terrorist group, who murdered many British soldiers and police and Palestinian civilians during the British Mandate of Palestine. He also personally ordered the assassination of UN envoy Folke Bernadotte, who had saved many Jewish children during the Holocaust (26).

Lehi and the Irgun also committed massacres of civilians during the 1948 war, including the notorious Deir Yassin massacre and the Al Dawayima massacre in which Irgun and Lehi terrorists killed children by breaking their skulls with sticks ; placed old women in houses them blew the houses ; and kept one woman and her baby alive so she could be their cleaning lady. When they were leaving they killed both of them too.

Photo: Yitzakh Shamir

None of this prevented Margaret Thatcher welcoming Menachim Begin to Downing Street in 1979 (27).

Nor has Netanyahu overseeing the killing of 2000 civilians , 550 of them children, in the 2014 Gaza war – in what every human rights group and the UN found to be war crimes, stopped the Conservative government of Theresa May from continuing to welcome him to the UK, or sell his government arms. Nor have all the killings since of mostly unarmed protesters on the Gaza border (28) – (32).

May doesn’t even balk at selling arms and providing RAF military advisers and political support to the Saudi dictatorship, 3 years after Amnesty and Human Rights Watch investigations concluded the Saudi air force in Yemen was deliberately targeting civilians, including schoolchildren in their schools. The recent Saudi airstrike on a school bus , killing 29 children, was among 50 air strikes on civilian vehicles so far this year. (33) – (39).

The fact that the Saudi and Israeli governments are recognised by the UN ; and their forces are regular militaries, is somehow meant to magically make ordering or carrying out the murder of civilians somehow ok. They even magically make acts of terrorism by Zionist terrorist groups before the state of Israel or the Israeli military existed magically become retrospectively fine too.

Irony-Gate Or Zionist-Gate

In 2014 Corbyn made a speech referring to some Zionists who had berated a Palestinian Authority representative who had made a speech in the UK parliament buildings. (See this video from 8.06) Corbyn claimed those people hadn’t understood “English irony…despite living here all their lives”, while the Palestinian did.  This has been much hyped as “anti-Semitism”, despite the fact that Corbyn knows that there are anti-Zionist Jews, since he's shared platforms with lots of them. So claiming he meant Jews when he said Zionists is ludicrous.

If there was any prejudice it was against Zionists not Jews. Many Jews are not Zionists. Many Zionists are not Jews. And "Zionist" is a vague term these days which is used sometimes to mean just "believes Israel has a right to exist" on the one hand (I'm a Zionist myself on that definition) ; and "someone who thinks Israel can do no wrong and should never be criticised" (hard-line Zionists) on the other. It’s likely Corbyn meant the latter as he backs a two state solution. And he's said he no longer uses the term because some actual anti-Semites do use it to mean Jews.

This did not stop Sajid Javid, Stephen Pollard and others making ridiculous comparisons of the “just change Zionists to Jews/ blacks/ whatever in this sentence to see how racist it is” variety.

Crying Wolf for Ulterior Motives –
In a political dispute with Jews
and Non-Jews on Both Sides

The worst thing about the propaganda campaign against Corbyn is that so many people are repeatedly crying wolf on anti-Semitism for ulterior and political motives. These include members of the ‘New Labour’ faction of the Labour party, who are hostile to Corbyn and the left of the Labour party both because he publicly embarrassed them by being right on opposing and voting against the Iraq war, PFIs and the deregulation that led to the banking crisis, when they supported all three. And because as Labour leader he stated in parliament that the war had been wrong and apologised for the past Labour government backing it. Labour Deputy Leader Tom Watson MP (New labour to the core) even told party members to stop criticising Blair and Brown’s record in government because it was damaging “our brand”. As if apologising for involvement in an unnecessary war that led to many people killed for nothing was like making mistakes in how you’re advertising Adidas trainers (40) – (41).

After Corbyn was re-elected Labour leader in a second leadership election, Watson openly said the party should scrap One Member One Vote and return to the ‘Electoral College’ in which a few hundred Labour MPs and a few dozen trade union leaders each got a third of the votes in any leadership election, relegating the majority of party members to almost bystanders (42).

The propaganda campaign on anti-Semitism as aimed partly at influencing the election of members to the ruling body of the party – the National Executive Committee – with voting taking place throughout August.

The Conservative party have an obvious motive to want to lose the Labour party votes, so May’s government were quick to adopt the IHRA definition within months of Corbyn being elected Labour leader (43).

The third group (overlapping with the other two) are people who are very pro-Israel to the point of seeing any severe criticism of any action of the Israeli government or military as “biased” and/or “anti-Semitic”. These include Labour Friends of Israel, Conservative Friends of Israel , the Jewish Leadership Council (or at least some of the largest groups within it) ; and the editors of three Jewish newspapers which ran ludicrous headlines on a Labour government on Corbyn posing an “existential threat to Jewish life in this country” (44).

The President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews clearly thought those newspapers were holding back far too much, telling an Israeli TV news station that Corbyn has “declared war on the Jews” and was “a security threat to the entire world” (45).

The Jewish Leadership Council – an umbrella group which includes the Board of Deputies, also includes BICOM – the British Israeli Communications and Research Centre whose stated aims include  “to support a close relationship between Britain and Israel”. Other member groups include the “Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland” – motto “For Israel” , the Zionist Youth League and the UIJA whose aims include “strengthening Jewish identity and a connection to Israel” and “encourage children to explore Judaism and Zionism and experience the wonders and challenges of the Jewish state”. So these groups would have every motive to try to conflate prejudice against Jewish with criticism of Israel.

The aim is pretty clear. To prevent any serious criticism of the Israeli government or military or their actions, by redefining it as anti-Semitism.

While pro-Israel Jewish groups are keen to present the dispute as one between “the Jewish community” and anti-Semites, in reality the pro-Israel groups are representative more of Jews and non -Jews who are very pro-Israel and very anti-Palestinian, with Jews and non-Jews on both sides of the dispute.

Despite their claims many British Jews got no vote in electing the Board of Deputies and many disagree with them, and agree with Corbyn and Labour on the IHRA definition needing modified to allow free speech on Israel. Among the better known are the Jewish Voice for Labour group,  author and Corbyn supporter Michael Rosen , the Free Speech on Israel group and comedian David Baddiel (although he is not generally a fan of Corbyn’s). Forty Jewish groups from around the world have also issued a joint statement saying that calling Israel racist is not anti-Semitism (46).

British Zionist Jewish groups are trying to tell the same story that Israel tells. Israeli governments paint their country as a tiny, weak isolated, state, surrounded by enemies and at risk of being destroyed at any moment. In reality they have probably the strongest and certainly the most technologically advance military in the Middle East, a nuclear deterrent ;  and the world’s only superpower, the US, as an ally – plus the whole of NATO.

British Zionist Jewish groups are painting themselves as a small isolated, threatened community, under constant attack and threat by a host of anti-Semites. In fact as Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, even many of the same people admit that in fact both Jews and Zionists have massive influence and plenty of representatives and allies (including by Jewish MPs) in parliament and the media. And as the IJPR study showed, under 10% of the population of the UK hold anti-Semitic views, with the majority condemning them utterly, with other minorities facing far more prejudice.

There is no group that speaks for all British Jews or all Jewish people around the world and is unbiased.  The IHRA definition is not an uncontested “universally” or “internationally” agreed definition of anti-Semitism, but a highly politicised one denounced even by its own drafter.

Any member of Labour’s NEC who votes to adopt the full IHRA definition should be aware that it is being used not a neutral definition but a politically motivated bear trap with which to destroy Corbyn, the left of the Labour party and any serious critic of Israeli government or military actions. Anyone who does not share that agenda and supports it is a turkey voting for Christmas.

 

Sources

(1) = BBC Radio 4 World at One 16 Jul 2016 ‘Naz Shah: My words were anti-Semitic’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-36802075

(2) = www.independent.co.uk 04 May 2016 ‘Jewish author whose Israel ‘relocation’ map was shared by Naz Shah condemns ‘obscene’ Labour antisemitism row’, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-antisemitism-row-naz-shah-israel-map-norman-finkelstein-obscene-a7012461.html

(3) = Jewish News 15 Nov 2017 ‘Labour bars candidate who said ‘Jews have reaped the rewards of playing victims’ http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/labour-bars-candidate-who-said-jews-have-reaped-the-rewards-of-playing-victims/

(4) = Institute for Jewish Policy Research 12 Sep 2017 ‘Antisemitism in contemporary Great Britain: Key findings from the JPR survey of attitudes towards Jews and Israel’, by Daniel Staetsky , http://www.jpr.org.uk/publication?id=9993 OR http://www.jpr.org.uk/documents/JPR.2017.Antisemitism_in_contemporary_Great_Britain.pdf

(5) =  www.theguardian.com 26 Sep 2017 ‘Labour fringe speaker’s Holocaust remarks spark new antisemitism row’, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/26/new-antisemitism-row-for-labour-over-fringe-speakers-holocaust-remarks-miko-peled

(6) = House of Commons 13 Oct 2016 ‘Home Affairs Committee, Antisemitism in the UK,  Tenth Report of Session 2016–17’,  https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/home-affairs-committee/inquiries/parliament-2015/inquiry2/
OR
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmhaff/136/136.pdf

(7) = Sky News 01 Aug 2018 ‘Jeremy Corbyn 'sorry' over chairing event with anti-Israel speaker’, https://news.sky.com/story/jeremy-corbyn-sorry-for-sharing-conference-platform-with-anti-zionist-speaker-11455926

(8) = Times Of Israel 05 Dec 2013 ‘EU drops its ‘working definition’ of anti-Semitism’, https://www.timesofisrael.com/eu-drops-its-working-definition-of-anti-semitism/

(9) = www.independent.co.uk 18 Jul 2018 ‘Labour has rejected the EU’s definition of antisemitism. This is morally wrong – and politically foolish’, by Denis MacShane;  https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/labour-antisemitism-eu-definition-jeremy-corbyn-margaret-hodge-woodcock-a8452436.html

(10) = WRITTEN TESTIMONY OF KENNETH S. STERN Executive Director, Justus & Karin Rosenberg Foundation Before the UNITES STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY November 7, 2017 Hearing on Examining Anti-Semitism on College Campuses, https://judiciary.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/20http://www.startribune.com/trump-says-wh-lawyer-mcgahn-isn-t-a-john-dean-type-rat/491208211/17/10/Stern-Testimony-11.07.17.pdf

(11) = www.timesofisrael.com 27 Feb 2017 ‘Britain’s oldest MP, Jewish and vociferously anti-Israel, dies aged 86’, https://www.timesofisrael.com/britains-oldest-mp-jewish-and-vociferously-anti-israel-dies-aged-86/

(12) = Haaretz (Israel) 17 Jun 2014 ‘Desmond Tutu: U.S. Christians Must Recognize Israel as Apartheid State’, https://www.haaretz.com/tutu-israel-is-apartheid-state-1.5252256

(13) = OpenDemocracy 17 Jul 2018 ‘The Code of Conduct for Antisemitism: a tale of two texts’,
https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/brian-klug/code-of-conduct-for-antisemitism-tale-of-two-texts

(14) = CST Jan 2009 ‘ Antisemitic Discourse in Britain in 2009’, https://cst.org.uk/docs/Antisemitic%20Discourse%20Report%20for%202009%20-%20web1.pdf ; see page 12

(15) = www.independent.co.uk 18 Aug 2018 ‚‘ Leading Palestinian group casts doubt on Labour claims about Jeremy Corbyn wreath-laying ceremony’, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-wreath-laying-palestine-israel-munich-massacre-bury-labour-party-a8496471.html

(16) = Telegraph 25 Nov 2004 ‘Straw lays wreath at Arafat's grave’, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1477480/Straw-lays-wreath-at-Arafats-grave.html

(17) = www.theguardian.com 13 Jun 2014 ‘Ariel Sharon's memorial service and funeral – as it happened’, https://www.theguardian.com/world/middle-east-live/2014/jan/13/ariel-sharons-funeral-live-updates

(18) = BBC News 18 Apr 2002 ‘Jenin 'massacre evidence growing'’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1937048.stm

(19) = Amnesty International 2002 ‘Israel and the Occupied Territories
Shielded from scrutiny: IDF violations in Jenin and Nablus’, https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/120000/mde151492002en.pdf

(20) = Human Rights Watch May 2002 ‘Jenin: IDF Military Operations’,
https://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/israel3/

(21) = B’Tselem 2002 ‘OPERATION DEFENSIVE SHIELD
Palestinian Testimonies , Soldiers’ Testimonies’, https://www.btselem.org/download/200207_defensive_shield_eng.pdf

(22) = B’Tselem Mar 2002 ‘Impeding Medical Treatment and Firing at Ambulances
by IDF Soldiers in the Occupied Territories’, https://www.btselem.org/press_releases/20020314

(23) = Jerusalem Post 13 Aug 2018 ‘Netanyahu condemns Corbyn's homage to Munich Massacre’,  https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Netanyahu-condemns-Corbyns-homage-to-Munich-Massacre-564755

(24) = Jerusalem Post 22 Jul 2011 ‘This Week in History: The King David Hotel bombing’,
https://www.jpost.com/Features/In-Thespotlight/This-Week-in-History-The-King-David-Hotel-bombing

(25) = Haarezt 26 Jun 2018 ‘Zionism's Terrorist Heritage’, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-zionism-s-terrorist-heritage-1.6217633

(26) = LA Times (Los angeles, US) 25 Mar 2010 ‘Israel glorifies its own murderers’, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/25/opinion/la-oew-hazou26-2010mar26

(27) = Jewish News 20 Jul 2017 ‘How Thatcher kept Israel’s political leaders smiling’, https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/how-thatcher-kept-israels-political-leaders-smiling/

(28) = Human Rights Watch World Report 2015: Israel/Palestine - Events of 2014,
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2015/country-chapters/israel/palestine

(29) = Amnesty International World Report 2014/15 – see p 197 Israel & occupied territorieshttps://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/POL1000012015ENGLISH.PDF

(30) = Observer 27 May 2018 ‘British arms exports to Israel reach record level’, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/27/british-arms-exports-israel-new-record

(31) = Human Rights Watch 02 July 2018 ‘Gaza Killings, Unabated Settlement Activity Underscore Need for International Accountability, Action’, https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/07/02/gaza-killings-unabated-settlement-activity-underscore-need-international

(32) = Amnesty International 14 May 2018 ‘Israel/OPT: Use of excessive force in Gaza an abhorrent violation of international law’, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/05/israelopt-use-of-excessive-force-in-gaza-an-abhorrent-violation-of-international-law/

(33) = BBC News 11 Dec 2015 ‘Yemen crisis: Saudi-led coalition 'targeting' schools’,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-35071200

(34) = Human Rights Watch 12 Sep 2017 ‘Yemen: Coalition Airstrikes Deadly for Children’,
https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/09/12/yemen-coalition-airstrikes-deadly-children

(35) = Human Rights Watch 2018 – Yemen , https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2018/country-chapters/yemen

(36) = Amnesty International Sep 2015 ‘Yemen: The forgotten war’, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/09/yemen-the-forgotten-war/

(37) = www.theguardian.com 16 Sep 2016 One in three Saudi air raids on Yemen hit civilian sites, data shows’, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/16/third-of-saudi-airstrikes-on-yemen-have-hit-civilian-sites-data-shows

(38) = www.theguardian.com 16 Aug 2018 ‘Yemen school bus bombing 'one of 50 strikes on civilian vehicles this year'’, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/16/yemen-school-bus-bombing-one-of-50-strikes-on-civilian-vehicles-this-year

(39) = www.theguardian.com 23 Jun 2018 ‘UK ‘hides extent of arms sales to Saudi Arabia’’, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/23/uk-hides-arms-trade-saudi-arabia--yemen

(40) = www.independent.co.uk 06 Jul 2016 ‘Jeremy Corbyn apologises on behalf of Labour for ‘disastrous decision’ to join Iraq War’,  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-chilcot-report-iraq-war-inquiry-apology-tony-blair-labour-party-a7123461.html

(41) = The Spectator 27 Sep 2016 ‘Full speech: Tom Watson at Labour party conference’,
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/full-speech-tom-watson-labour-party-conference/

 (42) = www.theguardian.com 09 Aug 2016 ‘‘I want to hug him but also shout at him’: Tom Watson on Jeremy Corbyn and Labour rifts’ https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/09/tom-watson-interview-jeremy-corbyn-labour-rifts-hug-shout ; 13^th paragraph, 1^st sentence ‘Watson wants to reverse Ed Miliband’s “terrible error of judgment” and reinstate the old electoral college system, which accorded one-third of the votes in a leadership election to the PLP and a third each to the unions and the members.’

(43) = www.theguardian.com 12 Dec 2016 ‘UK adopts antisemitism definition to combat hate crime against Jews’, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/dec/12/antisemitism-definition-government-combat-hate-crime-jews-israel

(44) = www.independent.co.uk 26 Jul 2018 ‘Corbyn government would pose an 'existential threat to Jewish life', say three major Jewish newspapers’, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-jewish-labour-government-antisemitism-newspapers-chronicle-ihra-definition-a8464311.html

(45) = Jewish News 23 Aug 2018 ‘Board president: It’s like Corbyn has ‘declared war on the Jews’’,  https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/corbyn-has-declared-war-on-the-jews-board-president-tells-israeli-tv/

(46) = 22 Jul 2018 ‘As Jews, we reject the myth that it's antisemitic to call Israel racist’,  https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/antisemitisim-jews-israel-labour-party-bds-jewish-coalition-palestine-a8458601.html

Thatcher and Thatcherism didn't save Britain – They've caused the problems it has today ; the Falklands War was as avoidable as Iraq ; and Thatcher didn’t promote freedom but backed and armed dictatorships

I won’t celebrate anyone’s death, but Prime Minister David Cameron’s claim that Thatcher “saved our country” and the £10 million state funeral (of which taxpayers will pay at least half the costs) are party political propaganda and a slap in the face to all the unemployed and disabled people facing benefit cuts today (1) – (2). The message is “She mattered, you don’t”.

Thatcherites, like Thatcher, are not revolutionaries but reactionaries who want to go back to the 19^th century when there was no welfare state or government regulation

Thatcherites see themselves as radical reformers going up against “the establishment” and “vested interests”. For Thatcher this meant trade unions and public sector professionals like teachers, nurses, doctors and lecturers. For brave Chancellor George Osborne, a public school and Oxford University educated millionaire Chancellor of the Exchequer, it means the vast oppressive charities and churches who help the poorest (4).

Thatcherites aim to roll back all the progress made by Atlee’s post-war Labour government and take us back to the 19^th century with no trade unions, no employee rights, no welfare state and no NHS (these “only encourage dependency”) – back to the poorhouse, the workhouse and the poor dying of hunger, cold or illness and being blamed for their own suffering.

It’s new only in rejecting the One Nation conservatism of politicians like Ian Gilmour MP (who condemned Thatcher’s policies and record in his book ‘Dancing With Dogma) and Prime Minister Harold MacMillan.

From On Yer Bike in the 80s to Workers and Shirkers today –
Different Decade, Same Thatcherite attempt to impose ideology over reality

The current Conservative government even continues to claim that it hopes its welfare “reforms” will “encourage people to work” even when it’s own (fiddled) figures show over 5 times more people unemployed (2.52 million) than job vacancies (494,000) (5) – (6). (The actual ratio is higher as the unemployment figures are fiddled downwards by using methods including counting people on unpaid temporary “workfare” placements as “employed”  (7).)

So basic arithmetic shows there are no jobs available for over 80% of unemployed people in the UK ; but Thatcherites have never let facts or logic get in the way of an ideology which pretends that the most powerful and wealthiest have no responsibility for the massive effects of their actions, while the poorest and most vulnerable, who have no power or influence, are supposedly entirely to blame for every problem.

Osborne claims people on benefits are all “shirkers” who don’t work (when many do) and don’t work by choice (8) – (9).

So for the first time since 1945 benefits are being cut to punish all the supposed “shirkers” (inflation is 2.2%, but the rise in benefits this year is limited to 1% -a real terms cut) (10)

This is exactly the same crap that was shovelled by Thatcher and her ministers in the 80s, when, after being elected on a campaign that promised to get unemployment down, they increased it from 2 million to over 3 million – and then people like Norman Tebbit told the unemployed to “get on yer bike” and get a job.

Thatcher didn’t save Britain – she began the policies that led to our current problems

Far from saving Britain, Thatcher caused many of our current problems.

Setting  us on the road to the banking crisis

As the late Conservative MP Ian Gilmour pointed out, by raising interest rates to double figures to cool a financial sector boom in the South-East of England, Thatcher destroyed much of Britain’s manufacturing industry, which was pushed into recession by the resulting over-valuation of the pound (hurting exports) and unaffordable credit, leaving us over-reliant on the financial sector, which she began the deregulation of with the 1986 ‘Big Bang’ (this being the main cause of the boom, which was as much a bubble as the one that burst recently) (11) - (12).

Destroying key industries due to blinkered ideology

She closed down our steel industry, while other countries, like Germany, continued subsidising steel and other key industries, even under conservative Chancellors like Helmut Kohl. As a result Germany’s economy remains stronger and its unemployment lower than ours.

(And in fact as Nobel prize winning South Korean economist Ha Joon Chang has shown with copious historical examples, every single developed country got that way by subsidising and protecting industries until they were strong enough to compete internationally (13))

Selling off assets that provided revenue to government

She sold off valuable assets like British Gas and British Telecom, losing the government revenue which could have funded the NHS, public education and the welfare state.  While it’s likely ideology was the main driving force for these privatisations, they also funded short term income tax cuts which helped her win elections. No wonder former Conservative Prime Minister Harold MacMillan accused her of “selling the family silver”. In fact it was worse than that. She sold the geese that laid the golden eggs.

Deregulation and privatisation leading to consumers being fleeced

Her privatisation and deregulation of every economic sector led not to greater competition but to oligopoly – sectors dominated by a few large companies which took over smaller firms or pushed them out of business, before charging customers whatever they like due to informal price fixing or simple profiteering. For instance today a handful of energy companies dominate Britain’s market for electricity and gas for the domestic and business markets.

While benefits for the poorest are cut and capped, these companies are allowed to charge whatever they like. They have doubled their profit margin by percentage on their average customer between 2011 and the first quarter of 2013 – under two years. The gap between their own costs and the prices they charge to customers rises constantly. The heads of these companies are rewarded with knighthoods (14) – (16).

This is Thatcherism again. Those who have wealth are assumed always to deserve it, while those who are poor are assumed to be poor because they are lazy or spendthrifts. In reality some of the wealthiest people in Britain started off with wealth or a family with connections to get them jobs on the boards of big firms – and then used their own wealth, or the company’s, or the bank’s, to buy political influence with donations to party funds, effectively exempting their company or their entire sector from any significant regulation. (And no, I’m not saying this is true of anyone who has more money than average, some did work hard for it and take risks and pay their employees fair wages).

Selling off council houses without replacing them –
meaning we have to pay housing benefit for rent for private landlords

She began the sale of council houses, without buying or building replacements. Today, due to the shortage of council houses, councils spend a fortune renting social housing from private landlords or paying housing benefits that go to those landlords in rent.

This is the main reason for high benefits payments to some families – because most of it goes on housing benefit that goes straight into the pocket of private landlords – but David Cameron’s Thatcherite government is capping the benefits payments to people stuck in this situation as if this was their fault, rather than buying and building enough council houses (17).

Every Daily Mail or Sun headline about asylum seekers or people on benefits living in mansions is a result of this policy, begun by Thatcher, but rather than blame her and her successors in government, they blame weak, powerless, easy targets instead.

Thatcher and the Falklands War –
Not a war hero but either incompetent
or else deliberately engineering
a war that wouldn’t have happened otherwise

The attempt to present her as a great war leader in relation to the Falklands, with 800 members of the military to be present at her funeral, is especially hard to reconcile with the historical facts.

When the Argentinians began talking of taking the Falklands in 1977, Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan and Foreign Secretary David Owen were persuaded by military chiefs to send a Royal Navy fleet to the South Atlantic to signal Britain would fight any invasion. The Argentinians backed down. In a similar situation in 1982 Thatcher’s government withdrew the last Royal Navy ship from the area during spending cuts, leading the Argentine military junta to believe Britain would not fight for the islands (18) – (19). They invaded – and then Thatcher declared war. Hundreds died as a result.

Some suggest that Thatcher, then the most unpopular Prime Minister in British history, after increasing unemployment to over 3 million, wanted a war to restore her popularity (20).

It’s impossible to know whether this was the result of blind ideology in imposing spending cuts and incompetence in not caring where they were made, or whether Thatcher wanted the Argentinians to believe Britain wouldn’t fight in order to get a war to restore her political fortunes. Either way she was responsible for an easily avoidable war and all the deaths in it. By any rational standard she should be condemned for not preventing war as simply and easily as Callaghan did rather than lauded for winning a war against an inferior military.

In the case of the 1990-1991 Gulf War against Iraq, which Thatcher committed British troops to shortly before her party got her to resign over the poll tax, there is no such doubt. The Bush (senior) administration and the Kuwaiti monarchy duped Saddam into war with the US over Kuwait. Bush and his advisers sought to repeat Thatcher’s feat of going from unpopularity on domestic unemployment and recession to election victory on a tide of war fuelled nationalism ; they failed.

The Poll Tax

The poll tax, which resulted in Thatcher’s resignation, was a local council tax under which everyone paid exactly the same amount irrespective of their income. It caused riots the last time it had been tried by an English ruler, in 1381, resulting in the peasants’ revolt. The Conservatives, who supposedly want everyone to know the history of Britain, seemed to be massively ignorant of it – they thought the poll tax was going to be hugely popular. Instead, as in 1381, it brought mass non-payment and riots. Thatcher, whose supporters claim she was acting on behalf of the “ordinary person in the street” showed she had no more clue what many of them wanted than medieval English kings knew of peasants’ needs.

A lover of freedom? Thatcher’s foreign policy

We’re told Thatcher was a “lover of freedom”. This is only true if you interpret freedom in the narrow neo-liberal sense of freedom for companies, banks and those with lots of money to do what they like – pay less tax due to tax cuts, avoid tax through tax havens, avoid regulation, charge customers whatever they want to, etc.

She certainly opposed Communism, but her role in it’s downfall, like Reagan’s, was negligible. Dissidents and protesters in the Soviet bloc did far more, as did Gorbachev – and before him Brezhnev by spending so much on the Soviet military that he drove the USSR’s economy into the ground. Her support for “freedom” elsewhere wasn’t just non-existent – she was supporting , training and arming the forces of many dictatorships.

General Pinochet aided the British war effort by allowing them to use Chilean ports. Thatcher treated him as an honoured friend after that, despite Pinochet having overthrown the elected government of President Salvador Allende in a military coup and having thousands of people tortured and killed.

She condemned Nelson Mandela’s ANC as terrorists and refused to place economic sanctions on Apartheid South Africa, though we are assured that in private she was putting verbal pressure on South African Presidents to free Mandela. Sanctions would have made considerably more difference and much sooner.

Thatcher’s government also provided training, tens of millions of pounds of money and dozens of jet fighter bombers to Mugabe’s military as he was massacring members of the tribes of his political opponents by the thousand. Perence Shiri, one of the officers who headed the genocide was subsequently allowed to come to Britain to train at the Royal Defence College. The massacres were played down by the Foreign Office as “exaggerated” (21) – (22).

She even armed Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and right up until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the middle of 1990; including selling him chemicals used as ingredients for chemical weapons, spare parts for tanks and attempting (but failing) to sell him hawk jets which could be used to bomb ground targets (as they later were in Indonesia) while Saddam was using chemical weapons on Iranians and Iraqi Kurds and carrying out his Anfal campaign of genocide against the latter. (23) - (24)

On top of this, British taxpayers ended up having to pay the £1 billion bill for Saddam’s purchases from British arms companies, as after the 1991 Gulf War there was no chance of his government paying – and Thatcher had approved the exports under Export Credit Guarantees  (25).

She signed the Al Yamamah oil for arms deal with the Saudi monarchy, which continues to be an absolute dictatorship imposing a medieval version of Islamic law – and torturing confessions out of suspects before executing them by beheading. Her son Mark Thatcher had a £1 million house purchased for him by a company based on a tax haven and owned by Wafic Said, a dodgy Middle Eastern arms deal broker. Said also gave Mark a £14,000 Rolex watch. Said’s wife donated large amounts to the Conservative party before the 2010 election . Mark Thatcher has denied rumours that he received millions more as part of the deal (26) – (27).

Margaret Thatcher also sent the SAS to train the mass murdering Khmer Rouge’s monarchist allies in laying land mines in the 1980s (28).

Supporting mass murdering dictators, monarchist allies of ultra-nationalist regimes guilty of genocide and governments which gave black people no rights whatsoever seem like strange ways to promote freedom, but then Thatcher never really supported freedom or democracy in the sense that most people use the words.

A Prime Minister who divided Britain – just like Major and Blair and Cameron

Thatcher was the first post-war Prime Minister to divide Britain, largely through strident English nationalism thinly disguised as British nationalism, combined with constant attempts to divide the majority in order to make conquering them easier.

Those who had jobs were encouraged to hate those who were unemployed as supposedly all lazy scroungers, while Thatcher continued to drive unemployment higher and higher. Those who worked in the private sector were told they should disdain public sector employees and trade unions as supposedly selfish “vested interests” – and the working class were encouraged to hate the middle class as effete namby pamby liberals who were meant to be out of touch with reality and had more education than was good for them. Hatred of foreigners, minority nationalities, religions and ethnic groups, as well as refugees and asylum seekers was also encouraged.

This was all continued under Blair to some extent, with opposition to his policies also blamed on the “middle class” as if a bunch of former lawyers who were now on over £100,000 a year ministerial and Prime ministerial salaries weren’t middle class.

Under Cameron we are back to all the divide and conquer tactics used under Thatcher.

Thatcher’s period as Prime Minister did more than anything to boost support for Scottish and Welsh devolution and for independence for Scotland - and this has been cemented by the continuation of many of her policies by her successors.

If Thatcher’s supporters don’t want her death and funeral politicised they should stop trying to use it to re-write history as party political propaganda

The Conservative party claim no-one should denigrate Thatcher’s record at this time. If they didn’t want her death and funeral politicised perhaps they shouldn’t have tried to use it for party political ends and to try to justify their current shameful policy of taking from the disabled, the poor and the unemployed to fund tax cuts for millionaires.

Given the Thatcherite establishment’s shameless rewriting of history, politicisation of her death and funeral and attempt to use it to gain votes, the political opponents of the government have no option but to respond in kind. Margaret Thatcher has thousands of admirers who are senior politicians, journalists and editors telling her version of history and the present. They won’t be allowed to stop the millions of people who oppose Thatcherism, and those who suffered under Thatcher and her legacy under her successors, telling the other side of the story.

(1) = BBC News 08 Apr 2013 ‘David Cameron: Baroness Thatcher 'saved our country'’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22068771

(2) = Telegraph.co.uk 15 Apr 2013 ‘Margaret Thatcher's funeral: it would be extraordinary not to spend so much, says No 10’,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/9994872/Margaret-Thatchers-funeral-it-would-be-extraordinary-not-to-spend-so-much-says-No-10.html

(3) = ITV news 16 Apr 2013 ‘Poll: 60% oppose taxpayer funding of Thatcher funeral’,
http://www.itv.com/news/update/2013-04-13/poll-60-oppose-taxpayer-funding-of-thatcher-funeral/

(4) = BBC News 02 Apr 2013 ‘George Osborne: Benefit critics talk 'ill-informed rubbish'’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21998784

(5) = Office for National Statistics 20 Mar 2013 ‘Labour Market Statistics, March 2013’,  http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/march-2013/statistical-bulletin.html

(6) = Office for National Statistics 20 Mar 2013 ‘Labour Market Statistics, March 2013 - Vacancies’, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/march-2013/statistical-bulletin.html#tab-Vacancies

(7) = Guardian 15 Jan 2013 ‘Statistics cast doubt on coalition's '500,000 new jobs' claim’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jan/15/statistics-doubt-coalition-500000-jobs

(8) = BBC News 03 Apr 2013 ‘George Osborne: Benefit critics talk 'ill-informed rubbish'’,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21998784

(9) = Guardian 22 Oct 2012 ‘Extra 10,000 working people a month reliant on housing benefit, says report’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/oct/22/working-people-housing-benefit-report

(10) = Guardian 01 Apr 2013 ‘The day Britain changes: welfare reforms and coalition cuts take effect’,  http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/mar/31/liberal-conservative-coalition-conservatives

 (11) = Ian Gilmour (1992) ‘Dancing with Dogma – Britain under Thatcherism’, Simon and Schuster, London, 1992, Chapter 4, pages 60 - 65

(12) = Observer 09 Oct 2011 ‘Big Bang's shockwaves left us with today's big bust’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/oct/09/big-bang-1986-city-deregulation-boom-bust

(13) = Ha Joon Chang (2007) ‘Bad Samaritans’, Random House, London, 2008

(14) = Guardian 02 Dec 2011 ‘Big six energy firms face fresh accusations of profiteering’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/02/energy-firms-accusations-profiteering-electricity

(15) = Guardian 12 Apr 2013 ‘Big six energy firms accused of 'cold-blooded profiteering'’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/apr/12/big-six-energy-firms-accused-profiteering

(16) = BBC News 31 Dec 2010 ‘New Year Honours: Broughton and Carr business knights’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12093737

(17) = BBC News 15 Apr 2013 ‘Benefit cap 'will encourage people to work'’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22148764

(18) = BBC News 01 Jun 2005 ‘Secret Falklands fleet revealed’,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4597581.stm

(19) = Freedman, Lawrence (2005) ‘Official History of the Falklands Campaign Volume 1’,
Routledge, 2005, chapters 8 – 9

(20) = Lenman, B. P. (1992) The Eclipse of Parliament: Appearance and Reality in British Politics since 1914 (London: Edward Arnold)

(21) = Campaign Against The Arms Trade ‘UK Arms Exports to Zimbabwe’ by Emily Mitchell, Section 3, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe , http://www.caat.org.uk/resources/countries/zimbabwe/ and
http://www.caat.org.uk/resources/countries/zimbabwe/#3

(22) = Programme Transcript – Panorama, "The Price of Silence" , RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC 1-10 Mar 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/programmes/panorama/transcripts/transcript_10_03_02.txt

(23) = Financial Times 29 Jul 1991 ‘Britain Exported Poisonous Gas Ingredients to Iraq’

(24) = Financial Times 30 Dec 2011 ‘UK secretly supplied Saddam’,
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/52add2c4-30b4-11e1-9436-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2QfcSoZKo

 (25) = Guardian 28 Feb 2003 ‘How £1bn was lost when Thatcher propped up Saddam’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/feb/28/iraq.politics1

(26) = Guardian 13 Apr 2013 ‘Mark Thatcher's return to the spotlight’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/apr/11/mark-thatcher

(27) = Guardian 28 May 2010 ‘Questions raised over Conservative party donations by businessmen's wives’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/28/donations-tory-wives-businessmen

(28) = Pilger , John (1998) Hidden Agendas Vintage , London , 1998, pages 33-34 , 260-261 of paperback edition