Labour Expels Black Jewish Activist Jackie Walker

Morning Star, UK

LABOUR expelled Jackie Walker today for what the party’s national constitutional committee found to be “prejudicial and grossly detrimental” behaviour.

The committee’s three-person panel found the charges of breaches of party rules levelled against the suspended activist had been proven.

Ms Walker, who remains national equalities officer for the wider movement’s pressure group the Labour Representation Committee, faced charges for having claimed at the 2016 Labour Party conference that Holocaust Memorial Day did not commemorate other genocides.

The panel heard that Ms Walker had also said at the same meeting that she “had not found a definition of anti-semitism that she could work with” and had claimed in another conversation that Jews were the “chief financiers” of the slave trade.

But Ms Walker, a black Jewish woman, has been strongly defended by organisations such as Jewish Voice for Labour and Labour Against the Witch Hunt, with members protesting outside Labour’s Southside offices on Tuesday and today in her support.

Her disciplinary case was interrupted on Tuesday when she said that she was not permitted to defend herself against recently added charges and left to protest outside the hearing. The Labour Party denied her interpretation of events, claiming that her accusations of foul play were “inaccurate and misleading.”

The Jewish Labour Movement, which has repeatedly attacked the Labour leadership for supposedly tolerating anti-semitism, said that the expulsion came “too late” and showed the party had taken “little action” against anti-semitism.

Labour’s general secretary Jennie Formby has investigated 673 alleged cases of antisemitism since taking up the post and has expelled 12 party members judged guilty of anti-semitism.