The Holocaust survivor who can no longer call Labour home
JVL Introduction
Pledged to make Labour feel “safe” for Jews, Starmer bids goodbye to another Jewish activist.
Middle East Eye carries an article about the fate of Stephen Kapos, for over 25 years a Labour party activist in Keir Starmer’s constituency.
No longer.
The final straw for him came when he as a Holocaust survivor accepted an invitation to speak about his experiences on Holocaust Memorial Day
But the organisation which invited him, the Socialist Labour Network, is proscribed by the Labour Party and Kapos was threatened with disciplinary action if he spoke to them!
Kapos refused the diktat and walked away.
____________
Thanks to Middle East Eye for permission to repost
This article was originally published by Middle East Eye on Wed 17 May 2023. Read the original here.
The Holocaust survivor who can no longer call Labour home
Stephen Kapos quit the party after being warned not to speak at a Holocaust memorial event run by a group it banned. He says he will not be silenced
Loading article text…
I think that Keir Starmer has sold his soul to self interest and crude ambition born out of vanity and hypocrisy.
Solidarity Stephen, I am too young to have experienced the Holocaust and I am a gentile too.
But one of my great uncles, a Spanish Republican that escaped to France and joined the Resistance, was captured by the Nazis in 1941 and was interned in Mauthasen, he managed to survive.
I was born under Franco regime and live under fascism until my late teens. I recognise Fascism when I see it. What you describe:
“disregard for the party’s own rules, and for natural justice, the drastic reduction of inner party democracy..”
What you are describing are markers of fascism. I define fascism as the subversion of democratic rules and this is what Starmer is doing subverting the Labour Party´s Rules to further his factional interest, in my eyes he is a fascist.
God help this country if he becomes PM, we will have a fascist as PM and this needs to be actively resisted.
Never make the mistake of confusing a right winger with a fascist, the latest is by far worse.
Of anti-semitism in Labour, Keir Stamer recently said: “All those that pretend it was exaggerated are part of the problem themselves and will be dealt with under the rules.” But it was exaggerated. So we must deny the truth. The Torah says “distance yourself from falsehood.” Labour says – embrace falsehood. How does that make Jewish people feel welcome in the Labour Party? Or anyone with regard for honesty? A Labour Parliamentary candidate told me he believed the problem was not exaggerated – insisting on his right to hold a different opinion from me. But Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer told LBC that Corbyn “wants to re-open Auschwitz.” Not an exaggeration, I spluttered to him. John Ware’s Panorama edited Izzy Lenga to leave the viewer with the impression that Labour members had told her “Hitler was right” and “Hitler did not go far enough” – “every day.” In fact she told the programme these abominable remarks were made by Neo Nazis. This was edited out in a “mix up” according to Ware. I worked for Panorama as an assistant producer and later as a producer for the BBC Money Programme. I know how these programmes are put together. The process is very deliberate. Let’s give Ware the benefit of the doubt. Panorama made a rare mistake. It was a mix up. But the outcome certainly exaggerated anti-semitism in Labour. This too I spluttered to the candidate. But he was resolute. In his opinion this was not an exaggeration. I’m still spluttering as I write.
Many thanks for making this brilliant article available for JVL readers. It is informative, balanced as journalism should be and wholy credible. Surely Sir Keir Starmer should get a copy!
Stephen Kapos’s steadfast dedication to justice is a shining example to follow.
‘To dream the impossible dream’………..in a Labour Party that encourages free and independent thought, with vigorous debate amongst its members and constituencies? That maybe is desirable in a healthy democracy but this is ‘New Labour’, a modern version in which members must ‘do as they are told’ and only ‘think what they are supposed to think’. This is ‘reformed Labour’, free of ideologies such as Socialism, that will prevent any disillusioned Tories voting for you, attracting only the ‘centre ground’ and gaining the support of MSM, especially Rupert Murdoch’s Media Empire. The Neo-liberal Capitalist economy is safe in Sir Keir’s hands, so let’s hear no more about genocide in Palestine or ‘the class struggle’ and other Marxist nonsense.
This is ‘top down’ autocracy where members are never consulted about opinion nor policy, they are told……….’if you know what’s good for you; no dissent, no questions. This is New New Labour.
Evil is in all of us
Be the ‘little boy’ who laughed at the Emperor’s new suit
Funny how Centrism only ever moves to the Right and never comes back the way
This is a terrible indictment of the Labour Party under Starmer.
However, I would like to express my doubts about this statement:
“I liked Harold Wilson and his resistance against joining in the Vietnam War…”
Cabinet papers for 1965 suggest that Harold Wilson was unable, rather than unwilling, to send British troops to Vietnam.
After 13 years out of power and with only a small majority, there would have been risks in alienating a vocal group of Labour MPs who opposed the war.
In addition, Defence Secretary Denis Healey was very hostile to President Johnson. On page 319 of his memoirs, he writes:
“Lyndon Johnson was a monster.”
It is by no means unusual for us to misunderstand the reasons for a particular outcome.
The experience of Kapos is a travesty and clearly documents the depravity of the Labour Leadership. Three cheers for his integrity in the face of the party’s threatening behaviour.
The last paragraph of this article is prophetic – a warning of what lies ahead unless the people of Britain pay more attention to the reality of what is now taking place in the Labour Party rather than the superficial gloss provided by Polly Toynbee and her colleagues in the commercial media.
Labour does not have a good record when it comes to choosing its leaders, but Keir Starmer is the only one out of 11 since the second world war who could reasonably be said to combine a tawdry nationalism with duplicity, a lack of political principles with vindictive intolerance towards those who do have them, and a willingness to defend the interests of an apartheid state rather than seek racial justice here in Britain. Given these defects, his personal vanity and wooden manner are almost irrelevant.
If the leadership of the Labour Party is so opposed to political debate and the freedom of members to express different points of view when it is in opposition, then Stephen Kapos is right to be fearful of how it would treat the democratic process were Starmer ever to enter Downing Street.
Starmer appears to be destined to be the sorry figurehead for the next phase of the UK’s shameful descent into sordid mediocrity. To have as a leader an authoritarian creep. Dull and uninteresting yet utterly amoral and acually a tyrant. In his heyday John Cheese would have had a good take on him. Big Mistake Two after Brexit.
I watched Stephen telling his story, you could sense how his memory of his experience during the Holocaust had affected him emotionally.
If Starmer had an ounce of compassion, he would have thanked him for telling his story but he has a job to do and is stopping at nothing to rid the LP of those that criticise Israel.
We must keep working to undermine him as Labour’s leader, his policies on the NHS are the same as the Tories, him and Streeting who has also taken money from a Private Health Company as well as Starmer, is to outsource NHS work to the Private Sector. I’m challenging him on His Twitter account and Facebook page.