Hornsey and Wood Green CLP (constituency Labour party) in London is represented in Parliament by Labour MP Catherine West. Ms West garnered attention in May when she suspended her membership of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) over its victim-blaming response to the massacre of unarmed Palestinians during the Nakba commemoration of their expulsion in 1948.
The contempt of JLM – an explicitly zionist organisation affiliated to the World Zionist Movement – for the left-wing, non-zionist Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) is well known; its members have refused to share a platform with JVL representatives and claim that only JLM is the authentic voice of Jewish members of the party.
JLM and its members have also been at the forefront of claims of ‘Labour antisemitism’. JVL, by contrast, acknowledge the existence of antisemitism in Labour as in any part of society, but reject claims that it is endemic – as indeed did a largely right-wing Commons Home Affairs Committee in 2016.
Hornsey and Wood Green CLP – the largest in the country – met this week and passed a motion to affiliate to JVL by fifty votes to twenty-nine, with thirteen abstentions.
The right-wing response was predictable, with the Jewish Chronicle reporting that one member quit the party and reporting social media claims that a vote to affiliate to a Jewish organisation means members want ‘virtually all Jews out of the Labour party’.
On the same evening, the CLP also voted to nominate all six candidates on the left slate for Labour’s National Constitutional Committee, the party’s senior disciplinary body.
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I understood that quite a lot of JLM members are not Jewish whereas JVL members are Jewish and non Jews can join as associates. I may be wrong. JVL is not affiliated to the Labour Party centrally because it has to have three years of accounts before applying. But Local CLPs may do so.
You’re not wrong.
The JLM brand become toxic amoung Pary member as could be demonstrated by the Hendon PPC elections in what it considers its strong hold. Mike Katz, who was the parachuted by the previous NEC candidate for GE17 (probably under the prejudice that will Jews vote for a Jew, IMHO), a vice chair of the JLM and supported by it, got only 22 of the votes, way down below the two others.
This too – good to know!
Great, but the worry as usual is the tiny turnout in the largest CLP in the country. I gain vey little comfort when I read of victories in such turnouts.