Deposed Labour MP founds anti-smear legal fund
19 December 2019Chris Williamson announced on Tuesday he would launch a fighting fund for left-wingers smeared and harassed by false allegations of anti-Semitism.
A former Labour member of the UK’s Parliament, Williamson was pushed out of the party earlier this year.
The legal fighting fund is being established thanks to a crowdfunding campaign and a legal victory by Williamson and his supporters.
“We’ll keep defending our comrades by any means necessary,” Williamson promised in a video posted to social media on Tuesday.
In October, Williamson won a High Court victory against his “re-suspension” by Labour Party bureaucrats in June.
On Tuesday, Williamson announced that the court had awarded him back the vast majority of his legal costs against the Labour Party.
CONCLUSIVE— Chris Williamson #GTTO (@DerbyChrisW) 17 December 2019
I defeated Labour's broken bureaucracy in the High Court: they must now pay all my costs, which will help establish a Left Legal Fighting Fund.
Whilst the decision came weeks ago, I'm announcing it now as I hoped to spare Labour adverse publicity during the election. pic.twitter.com/ANu7Yhwrmq
He’d only been able to fund those costs thanks to the generosity of ordinary Labour activists, who donated in a crowdfunder to meet most of the $98,000 required to fund the legal action.
Now that most of their donations will be recouped, they will be plowed back into defending others on the left similarly attacked and smeared as anti-Semitic.
Williamson was hounded out of the party in February, when he was first suspended.
A Labour disciplinary panel let him back into the party in June with a warning. But after outrage by Israel lobby groups and the media, he was “re-suspended” days later – against the party’s own rules.
It was that re-suspension which was ruled illegal by the High Court in October.
Manufactured anti-Semitism
In 2017, Williamson, a supporter of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, condemned the “lies and dirty tricks” around the “anti-Semitism smears” – becoming the only MP to do so.
After that he was made a prime target by the Israel lobby.
“We’ve seen manufactured anti-Semitism allegations as part of a concerted smear campaign,” Williamson said in his latest video on Tuesday.
“A hostile foreign government has mobilized its assets in the UK – which Israeli diplomats call their ‘power-multiplier’ – in an attempt to prevent a Corbyn-led Labour government,” he said.
This long running campaign against Corbyn by Israel and its supporters in the UK was successful last week.
After losing the general election, Corbyn announced he would step down as party leader before the next general election in 2024.
In his video, Williamson criticized Labour for failing to fight “interference in our election and calling out this outrageous assault on our democracy” saying the party had “internalized the narrative promoted by the far-right Israeli government.”
Israel and its UK assets “sought to prevent dozens of anti-imperialist socialists from standing for Labour,” Williamson said.
Many Labour activists who sought to run for parliament this year were either forced to revoke previously anti-Zionist statements, or be rejected.
In October, working class socialist and Palestine activist Colin Monehen was removed from a shortlist of Labour candidates for the election.
As has been endemic since 2015, he had been smeared with “anti-Semitism.”
