Results in Barnet have been the most persistent focus in the mainstream media (MSM) of all of last week’s local elections across England, with both local councillors and MSM commentators suggesting the result – in which some Labour councillors lost their seats – was because of supposed mishandling of antisemitism complaints by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
This simplistic narrative has been treated largely as fact – in spite of Labour gains in other areas with a high percentage of Jewish residents – with no examination of other possible reasons for results in which Labour actually gained three points, but lost some councillors.
During the Barnet election campaign, local Conservatives accused (archived here) local Labour councillor and mayoral candidate, Alison Moore, of wearing a shirt – to a ‘Purim’ party at a local synagogue – portraying images of three Jewish Tory councillors alongside a picture of Adolf Hitler in what she described as ‘villains on the back’:
It’s not hard to imagine the offence that associating Jewish councillors of any party with the nazi murderer-in-chief would cause, if the allegations are true.
This potential source of lost votes seems to have escaped mention in the MSM.
It does not appear that Ms Moore, while a Labour councillor, can credibly be called a Corbyn ally. She was a panellist at the 2012 conference of Labour right faction Progress, while her Twitter feed doesn’t appear to contain a single mention of the Labour leader by name. The nearest seems to be a reply to a Labour official who had tagged Corbyn into her original tweet.
The same article by Barnet Tories also trumpeted the decision of ‘lifelong socialist’ councillors to join the Tories, which may suggest that at least some Labour councillors in Barnet have a somewhat different view of socialism than the one that enabled Jeremy Corbyn to stun the Tories last year and to advance on those results last week.
The SKWAWKBOX has emailed Ms Moore for comment after several unsuccessful attempts to reach her by phone.
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Mother Teresa “fanatic, fundamentalist and fraud” is one of her heroines!
Why would anyone in their right mind wear something like that in public? Does nothing to portray the LP as a credible government in waiting.
Stupidty?
No, it wasn’t stupidity.
We clearly have an Anti-Socialism problem in the party
We should put all right wing critics of the party in Jewish dominated areas. This way their criticisms will actually effect themselves.
This argument is a bit like the idea that Labour lost in 1987 because it opposed nuclear weapons.
In his memoirs published in 1989, Denis Healey ridiculed the idea.