John Cryer MP speaks out on anti-semitism – and this time it’s personal

A few days ago, Leyton and Wanstead MP John Cryer released the statement reproduced below to his local constituency party.

As reported by this blog (see links), he has spoken out about Labour anti-semitism before, but this time round he is particularly forceful, and also introduces a personal dimension, alleging that attacks on him for raising the issue over the years were ‘orchestrated’ by ‘someone’ in Jeremy Corbyn’s office.

He ends by bluntly stating that those who continue to dismiss complaints about Labour antisemitism as ‘conspiracy’ and ‘smear’, the standard far Left mantra, ‘should ask themselves what they are doing in the…Party’.

This is strong stuff, and apparently has already led to a row with some local officers.

What will be the longer term impact in terms of Waltham Forest Labour’s continuing civil war?

For some, Mr. Cryer has written a suicide note: their assessment is that, by being so outspoken, he has overstepped the mark and infuriated the rank and file, a move that will inevitably hasten calls for his de-selection.

On the other hand, it is quite possible to reach an almost opposite conclusion.

At the 2019 election, and seemingly after only modest effort, Mr. Cryer was returned to Parliament with a 21,000 majority, having won 68.7 per cent of the vote.

He will know that many of those who now censure him are fixated about Mr. Corbyn, Israel, and ‘the Jews’, and thus unlikely to change their opinions whatever he says, and the EHRC report notwithstanding.

But he will also know that under Keir Starmer, the far Left will be increasingly marginalised, destined to end up as a fractious rump, shouting into an echo chamber.

Thus, he may believe that while public rows are always to be avoided if at all possible, he has no need to worry overmuch about his critics, and in fact is better advised to reach over their heads, as he has done here, and thus directly address a much wider and less partisan audience.

Time will tell which of these interpretations is correct.

Meanwhile, in related news, an ITV investigation concludes that ‘more than one third of Labour’s Muslim members and supporters have witnessed Islamophobia within the party’; while ‘the UK’s first Hijab-wearing mayor’, Islington councillor Rakhia Ismail, has defected from Labour to the Conservatives ‘over claims of racism and oppression from Corbyn’s own branch patch’.

What an unsavoury outfit the Labour Party has become.