Right-wing Labour MP’s local members vote in favour of selection contest
The right-wing Labour Barking MP Margaret Hodge has been ‘triggered’ by local members – in other words, they have voted for an opportunity to select a different candidate to represent them at the next general election.
Predictably, other right-wing Labour figures are calling the democratic move antisemitic, but Hodge has a controversial history dating back to before she was an MP, when she was leader of Islington council criticised for failures in child protection.
Hodge was also condemned by the Refugee Council and other bodies for adopting BNP-like positions to ‘see off’ a challenge by the racist party, for example in her statement that “We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants.”
Hodge was also recently the subject of an antisemitism complaint by an Orthodox Jewish member of the party and has been criticised for ignoring Orthodox Jewish pleas to save a Jewish cemetery in the borough – which Jeremy Corbyn, now Labour Party leader, helped at the time to save.
Five of the eleven local Labour branches voted in favour of the triggering, with rules on the process requiring one in three branches to support it. Four branches did not vote, because the trigger threshold had already been reached.
Under Labour’s trigger rules, a full selection will now be arranged on an OMOV (one member one vote) basis. Ms Hodge will automatically be shortlisted under Labour Party trigger rules, as long as she wishes to stand in the contest.
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Now for the Antisemitism charges that will come thick and fast from the same factions that are intent on Corbyn never being PM.