Newly-appointed general secretary made interim pending result of new election
As Skwawkbox revealed on Friday, new NASUWT teaching union general secretary Matt Wrack was targeted for a coordinated smear campaign by the Israel lobby after his appointment, because of his opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and his refusal to accept the lobby’s smears against former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Wrack, formerly general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, was appointed to the position uncontested earlier this month after the NASUWT executive ruled that no other eligible candidates had received enough valid nominations to stand. One would-be candidate, the union’s Welsh regional secretary Paul Butler, had launched a bid for a court injunction against the appointment and pressure groups directly linked to Israel appeared to see this as an opportunity for an attack on Wrack, falsely claiming Jewish NASUWT members were ‘uneasy’ because Wrack had stood up for Corbyn. The source of funding for Butler’s legal action is not yet clear.
Now, Skwawkbox can exclusively reveal that following the smear campaign the union has called a general secretary election and changed Wrack’s appointment to an interim one pending the outcome, despite the injunction case not being scheduled until Monday. NASUWT branch secretaries have been informed and the Israel lobby appears to have got its way, at least unless Wrack wins the contest.
Israel has murdered more than 200,000 civilians so far in Gaza, with many more maimed, and is engaged in a bombing and starvation siege against those who survive. Israel’s PM and former defence minister are wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, yet the UK government continues to provide its armed forces with military assistance and to wage war on UK journalists and citizens who oppose the genocide.
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I hope NASUWT’s decision is a tactical one, to reassure some members of good intent, members who have been probably whipped into a frenzy of false fear, grounded in nothing,by the coordinated tactics of the Israel lobby. The lobby is notorious and strategies weaponising antisemitism against the left will go down in history as one of the most successful ever. We know that Israel’s leaders care nothing about antisemitism other than how they can use it is a powerful cudgel to beat the very people who fought against antisemitism all their political lives, and in fact encouraged the extreme right in its real anti Jewish ant semitic actions. The Israelis are the ones who want power, and to erase Gaza and Palestinians from the map with US and UK backers and the complete handwashing of rthe problem by the mostly autocratic Middle East countries who do very little. Infamy indeed. I hope further investigations will illuminate the disingenuous nature of Butler’s bid and the Israel lobby connections of his backers. It is hugely important to expose the lies time and again made against Jeremy Corbyn – used as a weapon to crush him and the left (one of those rare chances for a new and positive direction for the world in recent history as we can truly judge now Trump has ascended) and against which the left and Corbyn inevitably failed , when the mainstream media and Starmer added to the frenzy and pile on from 2015 to 2019. I do not want to go into Corbyn’s lamentable failure to realise what was going on and counter it with skilful communications. His foreign policy was not his strongest point either (Ukraine!) . He didn’t. But history will ensure that future generations will know the truth – that Israel marched in lockstep with fascists in the 2020s.
Quite. At a time when we should be in full panic mode about children’s reluctance to attend school, their unhappy “childhoods,” the supposed burgeoning of a crisis of SEND children, the vicious nature of school discipline, the role of Ofsted in being a totalling uncaring facilitator of all the above, and the sheer ignorance of a succession of SoS’s for Education, we are being sidelined into querying the non-pro-Israel (wtf has that to do with ANY job) attitude of someone whose job has sfa to do with Israel!
“I hope NASUWT’s decision is a tactical one….”
Me too, poetrymuseum. The key to overcoming bullying and bullies is always to fight back! Matt Wrack has been given a golden opportunity to
i) draw attention to Israel’s bullying here, and
ii) provide NASUWT members with an opportunity to reject the Occupier’s bullying, renew Matt Wrack’s democratic contract and thereby directly support the occupied people of Palestine in their rejection of apartheid, occupation and genocide.
poetrymuseum
At the end of your post you say ‘I do not want to go into Corbyn’s lamentable failure to realise what was going on and counter it with skilful communications’.
Of course Jeremy realised what was going on… how could he not when he was being smeared and demonised on an almost daily basis. But perhaps you could answer a question I have asked posters (on here, and other blogs) on more than a few occasions during the past eight/nine years, *but*, have never once got a reply, and that is this:
What would you have had Jeremy say, and what would these ‘skillfull communications’ have actually amounted to?
I’d be grateful if you could spell it out, along with the five people who (at the time of writing) gave your post a Like. Thanks
And anyone else for that matter.
Anyway, what I wanted to say in relation to the above article is this:
That Matt Wrack and his supporters should ask every single person and organisation that’s attacking and smearing him why they think it is that not a single one of the individuals or groups who accused Jeremy of antisemitism and (in some cases) of being an antisemite, ever reported him to the police for racism/hate speech.
And when they don’t respond, which they won’t of course, Matt and his supporters should put a leaflet together (A4 size so that people can run off as many copies of it as they want to, and distribute them locally) saying as much, and outing them, in effect, along with a number of examples of the smears being made against him. And then print off tens of thousands of copies to be put through people’s doors, at the end of which – the leaflet, that is – it should say PLEASE COPY AND/OR SCAN AND CIRCULATE TO FAMILY/RELATIVES AND FRIENDS AND WORK COLLEAGUES ETC. And perhaps add: DEMOCRACY DEPENDS ON IT.
They should also add that the WHOLE of the MSM participated in the A/S smear campaign, and also mention some stats MediaLens posted when Jeremy was leader of the LP, the first from an article entitled Charges ‘Without Merit’ – Jeremy Corbyn, Antisemitism, Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky, posted in September, 2018:
Labour was defeated in the general election of May 7, 2015, causing leader Ed Miliband to resign. On June 3, the BBC reported that Corbyn had joined the contest to replace him. We monitored this period closely and it is simply unarguable that Corbyn was portrayed by journalists, and even party political foes, as a basically decent person. He was depicted as a left relic, certainly – irrelevant and ridiculous – but also as sincere and well-intentioned. There was no sense whatever in ‘mainstream’ media coverage that Corbyn was a malign individual.
In July, we conducted a ProQuest newspaper database search, which found the following hits for UK press articles mentioning:
‘Jeremy Corbyn’ and ‘antisemitism’ before May 2015 = 18 hits
‘Jeremy Corbyn’ and ‘antisemitism’ after May 2015 = 6,133 hits
None of the 18 mentions before May 2015 included any accusation that Corbyn was antisemitic. And it was not, as some people have claimed, that Corbyn, a leading anti-war MP, was unknown or unworthy of attention. ProQuest found 3,659 hits for ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ before May 2015.
And also this, from an article entitled Reopening Auschwitz – The Conspiracy To Stop Corbyn, posted on December 3rd, 2019:
Our ProQuest database search of newspaper articles for ‘Corbyn’ and ‘anti-semitism’ shows how intensively the issue has been used to attack Corbyn prior to the looming election on December 12:
September = 337 hits
October = 222 hits
November = 1,620 hits
While opinions in effect declaring Corbyn a Nazi are widely reported, opinions defending Corbyn by the likes of John Bercow, Gideon Levy, Norman Finkelstein, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Cook, Michael Rosen and others reach a comparatively small audience on social media but are simply ignored by the establishment press reaching millions.
And yes, they could, and should also include what John Bercow said about Jeremy in relation to the A/S accusations in an interview with Alastair Campbell for GQ magazine.
Forgot to say that they should mention in the leaflet that not a single MSM organisation covered what John Bercow said about Jeremy. And also that they should ALSO ask the EHRC the same question (I did so myself during the time they were allegedly investigating the LP, but they avoided answering the question in their reply to me).
It’s funny how history repeats itself time and time again the being culled by the Nazis are now themselves become them
The world seems full of utterly intolerant people who cannot abide someone who is of a different race, religion, political stance, nationality, even sports team. None more so than the Israeli lobby. I simply look at the appointment of David Kogan. He hardly seems to fit the bill of what was originally being proposed – putting the normal football supporter’s interests first, yet he ticks all the “boxes.” And we as a population or as genuine football fans (in my case for 74 years as a fan of a currently unsuccessful club languishing in Division 4), but he fits EXACTLY into the categories are required by Starmer!
Then we look across the Atlantic, and see where we ARE heading as a country!
Excellent point. David Kogan