Caught passing information to the Compliance Unit – Moyle deprecates social media abuse unless he is doing it
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| Lloyd Russell-Moyle specialises in conflict resolution but seems to cause more conflicts than he resolves |
What
can one say about someone who wrote to me on 22nd August saying that
should say things publicly which are kind, and if you are unable to say that
then one must be quite [sic] and say nothing on blogs and social media, esp about members. This is
relevant when it comes to other members. I believe that attacking other members
for taking (what you might believe is the wrong view) publicly brings the party
into disrepute and it is an attempt to intimidate people from not saying
anything.
sentiments to be sure, but not quite at one with his actions!
a week ago, in conversation with others including Sam Wheeler, a member of the Momentum
Steering Committee and one of those who caved into the Jewish Labour Movement’s racist
witch-hunt by removing Jackie Walker as Vice-Chair was not quite so restrained. Another participant was Joe Riches, a councillor
and Yorkshire regional organiser of the Jeremy for Labour campaign who told
Sheffield Momentum not to hold a stall at a Corbyn rally and was told where to
go. Indeed Moyle’s comments fit squarely into the definition of abuse that has
got thousands of Labour members suspended.
Moyle wrote:
fact] and can tell you he is an abusive, unpleasant little man. I have told him that to his face. He alienates people who should be his natural
supporters… he has gone about bullying the (Jewish, 17 year old) chair of our
young labour group… abusing cllrs and being disruptive at meetings even when
the “left” was winning. There was not a
right wing coup Brighton but an authoritarian move from the national office to
suspend when the left was elected….’
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| A classic example of do what I say rather than what I do |
Moyle
obviously finds my height of some significance.
Perhaps I should also associate being a liar with having ginger
hair! It has about as much logic.
Moyle said nothing to my face because he is
one of those people who is polite to someone’s face and then goes gossiping when their backs are turned.
iii.
There is
no truth in the allegation that I bullied anyone. Yes I suggested to the Chair of
Young Labour in Brighton when he announced to the world that he was joining the JLM that he was joining a group that defended ethnic
cleansing. Should age protect young
people from the implications of their actions or should one patronise them and refuse to discuss ‘adult’ topics even over twitter?
Perhaps we should have been politer with 15 and 16 year old National
Front supporters according to this same logic?
iv.
Likewise I
pointed out to Progress councillors Caroline Penn and Emma Daniels, who also
joined the JLM that they were joining an organisation which supports Israel’s
military occupation of Palestinian territories and that its methods include minor
things like the beating up and torture of 12 year old children and shackling and
depriving them of liberty without access to their parents. Unsurprisingly Daniels, Penn and 17 yr old
Joe were all Owen Smith supporters.
v.
It is a lie
that I have disrupted any meetings, but what is one lie among many?
vi.
The idea
that there wasn’t a right-wing coup in Brighton is fanciful. It was the false allegations of Moyle’s councillor
friends which enabled the national party to intervene and suspend the Party.
whose only firm principle is the need to advance his own career. Despite policy being passed by the local party
opposing my suspension, Moyle has repeatedly written to the Compliance Unit
urging them to take swifter action and to ensure that they have a water-tight
case for expulsion. Being a believer in openness, honesty and transparency, he didn’t think of copying me into the correspondence.
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| A heavily redacted e-mail from Moyle to the Compliance Unit |
months. During that time he managed to
alienate most members. At one meeting Clare
Wadey, herself a member of the Executive, challenged Moyle’s high-handed and
undemocratic behaviour such that he ordered her from the meeting. When his ruling was put to the vote it was
overwhelmingly defeated. On another occasion he tried to use procedural rules he had invented to prevent an emergency motion in support of the Doctors’ strike. Again he lost.
on anti-Semitism issued at the height of the fake anti-Semitism hysteria.
anti-Semitism in the Labour Party’. It tookas its starting point the fake and contrived campaign against ‘anti-Semitism’
that Progress, John Mann and the right-wing media concocted.
calls ‘revisionist history’ i.e. Holocaust denial with ‘(making) links between
the Nazi regime and the demand for a safe homeland’ i.e. Zionism. Zionism was not a demand for a safe
homeland, it was a movement for a Jewish settler colonial state in a land where
it was intended that the indigenous population, the Palestinians, would be ethnically
cleansed. Leading Zionists such as Arthur Ruppin were quite clear about this at the time. Zionism was a movement to establish a state of Jewish racial supremacy not a state whose primary purpose was saving Jews from the Holocaust. That was why David Ben-Gurion in reaction to the Kindertransport, which the Zionists opposed, after Kristalnacht told the Mapai (Israeli Labour Party) Central Committee on 7.12.38 that:
If I knew that it would be possible to
save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only
half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the
second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but
also the history of the People of Israel.
This quote can be found in the official biography of Ben Gurion, ‘The Burning Ground: 1886-1948’ by Shabtai Teveth on p.855. The whole chapter, entitled ‘Disaster Means Strength’ on the Nazi Holocaust and Zionism is worth reading for the cynical Zionist attitude that saw the Holocaust as a golden opportunity for advancing Zionist claims to a Jewish state. In fact their attitude differs little from their exploitation of the Holocaust for Zionist purposes today.
Moyle’s statement on ‘anti-Semitism’ repeats for a second
time that there is a growth in anti-Semitic attacks in Europe, a dubious proposition
in itself. It then informed people that ‘Anti-Semitism
is a distinct form of racism’. Another meaningless statement since all forms of racism are distinctive in their own way.
the muddle headedness of the Labour Right on Palestine the statement then went
on to declare that ‘Recent increases in people using “Zionist” as a
substitute for “Jew” cannot be tolerated in our Party or our
communities.’ Perhaps Lloyd and co. were unaware
that it is the Zionists who assert that being Jewish and Zionist is one and the
same. For example in this week’s Jewish
Chronicle there is an article Board
criticises pro-Palestinian Soas students’ anti-Zionism event in which Marie
van der Zyl, the Board of Deputies of British Jews vice-president, said:
“For the vast majority of British Jews,
political, cultural and religious affiliation with the state of Israel is a
fundamental part of their Jewish identity.’
The occasion for this statement was the fact that students at the School of Oriental & African Studies had invited non-Zionist Jews to a meeting to discuss the differences between Zionism and Jews. The Zionist Board didn’t like this since it spends most of its time trying to confuse the two as well as closing down any meetings with which it doesn’t agree! In Israel dissidents are simply interned, subject to 6 months administrative detention without trial, which sometimes lasts for years. In Britain they simply try to prevent free speech. It is a constant theme of Zionists that being Jewish and Zionist is one and the same and hence anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is also the same. Except of course for the thousands of Jewish anti-Zionists who are ‘self-hater’s, a term borrowed from the Nazi lexicon. According to the Nazis, German anti-fascists also hated themselves since they denied the primacy of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ hence they hated themselves since, for fascists, a person only exists to serve the nation/race.
The article starts ‘The Board of Deputies has condemned a planned event by a
pro-Palestinian student group which aims to separate anti-Zionism from
antisemitism.’ Quite understandably,
the BOD wishes to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, i.e, hatred of Jews with
support for the Palestinians. Lloyd was not however calling out Zionists who deliberately conflate the terms ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jew’.
Having muddled up just about everything it was possible to muddle, the statement went on to say that ‘The existence of Israel and its peoples right to self determination
should not be questioned more than anyone’s right to a nation.’ What Moyle omitted to say (or more likely was too ignorant to have inquired into) is that Israel is not
just another state, but a Jewish state in which racism is enmeshed in the fabric
of the state – the Israeli state is the most racist state in the world. This is because
it is the only active settler colonial state today in the world.
It is a state consisting of Jews and non-Jews. There is according to Zionist ideology no Israeli
nation – the Israeli courts ruled against this in George Tamarin v State of Israel in 1972 and again in Uzi Ornan v State of Israel in 2013.
In the latter case Ha’aretz noted that the Supreme Court’s ‘statement
that there is no such entity as an Israeli nation strongly echoes the statement
by Golda Meir when she was prime minister that “there is no Palestinian
people.”
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| One of Moyle’s redacted emails |
In Tamarin Justice Agranat ruled
that ‘the desire to create an Israeli
nation separate from the Jewish nation is not a legitimate aspiration. A
division of the population into Israeli and Jewish nations would … negate the
foundation on which the State of Israel was established.’ In plain English, as a Jewish state, Israel is a state not only of its own Jewish citizens but Jews living outside the state, like myself. The problem with Israel, uniquely amongst states, is that it is not a state of its own citizens but a state of Jews, be they citizens or not.
So the concept of the right of Israeli people
to self-determination is a nonsense.
There is no Israeli people. Zionism
refuses to accept such a notion. Ipso
facto there cannot be Israeli self-determination. See Discrimination
is legal, there are no Israelis: Reading the Supreme Court’s decisions on
Israeli nationality. Of course I
wouldn’t expect Moyle to understand any of this since he takes pride
in his ignorance.
The final part of Moyle’s statement was that ‘many tens of thousands of Israeli citizens criticise their government on
a daily basis through democratic processes.’ is simply making a virtue
out of stupidity. The anti-Zionist and
anti-racist Left in Israel probably doesn’t even comprise more than a thousand Israeli
Jews. That was the situation in South
Africa where anti-apartheid whites were a tiny handful. Israel is a state where there is a permanent state of emergency, where torture is regularly used (mainly against Palestinians) where segregation in education, land, employent is the rule and where even Israeli Palestinians live there as guests, on suffererance. In the Occupied West Bank the situation is an openly apartheid one since there are two different legal systems – one for Jewish settlers and one for Palestinians.
Moyle might be forgiven his
ignorance except that he reacted to my letter criticising his statement by
writing to the Compliance Unit asking them to speed up my expulsion. Unfortunately for the hapless Moyle, I gained
access to his letters via a Subject Access Request. True LP HQ did blank out his name but it wasn’t
difficult to discern that there was only one rat who would write as an informer to the
Compliance Unit. To
Russell-Moyle the Compliance Unit is a neutral body implementing Labour Party rules,
even if they occasionally get it wrong, rather than a body which interprets and
uses the rule as part of the campaign against supporters of Jeremy Corbyn.
The fact that the Compliance Unit and LP Headquarters have, in a vain attempt to stop Jeremy Corbyn being elected, expelled, suspended or otherwise deprived of their vote thousands of Labour Party members is of no account. The fact that his own Party has been suspended means nothing.
One only need contrast the behaviour
of Moyle with that of Kathy Runswick and Paul Davies, Chair and Vice
Chair of Wallasey CLP who have fought
the Compliance Unit on behalf of their parties rather than acting as a
second-rate member of the Stasi.
I wrote to Moyle when I first
discovered that he was an informer. Being in a forgiving mood I offered him an opportunity to apologise and I would not
publicise the matter. In response Moyle
wrote that:
‘Tony,
to the regional office on a number of occasions about differnt members.
Generally I take and took the view that conflicts should be handled in a clam,
friendly and local manor and not escalated to national office.
investigation was started and after a number of phone calls with Mr Gregson on
your behalf asking him to expedite the process, be open and transparent I wrote
to him on the following matters:
other members
investigation
of accusation/making the case watertight
point 2 is mutually agreeable by all, that any case must be quickly dealt with
and I have repeated this call a number of times.
that point 3 is in hindsight poorly worded from myself, but is an attempt to
get across that you must be told what you are being accused of and that any
case must be clear cut and not smoke a mirrors. I believe that you often try
and run rings around people on the political stance, when in essence the
complaint it actually about your unpleasant behaviour. In this regard, whist
i’m no expert, I think a case based only on anti-semitism would not stand up
against you, but your behaviour is something to be desired.
is my concerns at your ongoing abuse on social media to our members from
yourself. Your are not the only members who I have written to Harry Gregson about
their use of social media, including members of the current executive who I
have had to pass on their writings after complaints have been made.
formal complaint has been made to the Party, I pass on all infomation I have on
that person to the national office for them to investigate because its
effectually taken out of my hands.
firm belief that one should say things publicly which are kind, and if you are
unable to say that then one must be quite and say nothing on blogs and social
media, esp about members. This is relevant when it comes to other members. I
believe that attacking other members for taking (what you might believe is the
wrong view) publicly brings the party into disrepute and it is an attempt to
intimidate people from not saying anything.
works both ways and I can assure you I have made complaints and reported abuse
on all sides.
note that I not once challenged or asserted that you were an anti-semite, in
fact the very opposite, I believe that the party shouldn’t pursue any political
case against you, because it could well fail. I do however believe that your
behavior to other comrades (even if you don’t consider them comrades) is
intolerable and must stop.
that you can accept my limited apoligy for point 3 being poorly worded, and I
hope that you will understand that whilst I don’t regard you as an anti-semite,
I do believe that to style, tone and manor which you comment to be very
unpleasant and to have no place in the Labour Party.
I believe that people can change, they can reform and that support for you to
understand how human being should talk to each other in professional
communications could help you.
As a result of this grudging half-apology I decided to let the matter rest
until the Facebook comments above surfaced.
Again I offered Lloyd the opportunity to apologise and explain
himself. Clearly he felt incapable of
either offering an explanation or an apology, hence this post.
By his own definition, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, if he has any integrity left,
will shortly be referring himself, of his own volition to the Compliance Unit!
Politically the conclusion to be drawn from this is that there is a layer of
soft-Corbyn supporters and low level officials and councillors who believe that
the Labour Party machine is a neutral instrument that can be captured intact
and then used against other socialists in the Labour Party.
Tony Greenstein
