I joined the Labour Party in 1969 and, in those days, people came into politics to do things for their local community. You didn’t get involved in politics to go on telly and be a celebrity.
On the day I became the leader of the GLC, that evening Thatcher made a speech to the Scottish Conservatives and said my plan was ‘to impose on Britain a communist tyranny like those of Eastern Europe’. Now, until Thatcher made that speech, no GLC leader had ever been a national political figure.
I was being depicted as a ‘supporter of the IRA’s bombing campaign’, my loyalty was ‘to the Soviet Union, not Britain’, I was attacked three times physically on the streets in the month after Thatcher made that speech. But then, by the time we’d cut the fares and then, eventually, I got on programmes like Question Time, people realised this was all untrue.
I had been retired from politics. I was still on Labour’s National Executive, and I’d go and campaign for MPs at the general election and things like that, but I’d broadly been retired. But then, when Jeremy became the leader of the Labour Party, I got invited to lots of interviews about Jeremy Corbyn. And I was doing radio and TV interviews saying, ‘Jeremy could win the next election, he’s a genuine socialist, he’ll be a good Prime Minister’, and so on. And then some of the media started to raise this issue, ‘Is there a problem of antisemitism?’.
I think what’s so important about challenging the EHRC report is that a substantial chunk of the Jewish community believes all these lies and smears about Labour being ‘antisemitic’,and that causes a fear and a concern. And we need to make certain that the Jewish community doesn’t have to live with that worry and concern. If we want to have a serious political world,people must be able to find out what the truth is, not just endlessly see lies and smears being repeated in the media.
[The EHRC] report implies that I ‘supported’ what Naz Shah had said. Well, I made it absolutely clear I thought what she said was ‘over the top’, but I didn’t think she was ‘antisemitic’. A lot of people say things and get them wrong. And, equally, the idea that I would have said ‘Hitler was a Zionist’ is absolutely bizarre. He’s a man who loathed and feared Jews all his life. I simply made a reference to the deal that he did with the German Zionist movement in the summer of 1933.
But, for the EHRC not to have questioned me, gone into detail on all of this, does indicate that, broadly, they were producing a report to try and undermine the Labour Party, because the establishment fear a genuine socialist government is going to make a real, substantial change, crack down on all the tax-dodging and the money-laundering and things like that.
And so, it was all about keeping a lefty out of power. And that’s not just here in Britain. If you look when Bernie Sanders was running for the Democrat nomination in the American presidential elections, he was being depicted as a ‘communist’, that if Bernie Sanders had won, ‘America would no longer be a democracy, it’d be a communist dictatorship’. All this sort of nonsense goes on.
Me and Jeremy have just had to put up with lies and smears but, if we’d been born and brought up in Latin America, we would’ve been murdered like most left-wingers were there in the 70s and the 80s under all the military dictatorships. So, all over the world, the establishment and the elite are determined to prevent a socialist coming to power.
When Jeremy became the leader of the Party, no one had anticipated that as a possibility,and no one was really prepared for it, and neither was he! I mean, he’d spent almost four decades sitting on the backbenches of the Labour Party, and he just didn’t really cope with it,I think. That’s the problem.
There was this leaked report investigating what was happening in the Labour Party bureaucracy, and it details all these amazing emails that senior officials in the Party bureaucracy were sending each other, really hostile to Jeremy Corbyn, desperate to get rid of him, and ramping up ‘antisemitism’, even though we’d just not had that as a problem in the history of the Labour Party.
When you had the Labour MP John Mann shouting in my face that I’m a ‘Nazi apologist’,then launching this big lie that I said ‘Hitler was a Zionist’, and then about an hour later the General Secretary of the Labour Party suspends me without picking up the phone to ask, ‘Is any of this true?’. But then it took off massively, it dominated the news in the days that followed. Jeremy should’ve clamped down, suspended the General Secretary, said, ‘You can’t do things like that’, come out and said, ‘There isn’t a problem with antisemitism’.
Part of the problem with Jeremy is he needed to clamp down on the people undermining him. But, in all my life, I’ve never met anyone nicer than Jeremy Corbyn. No one would say that about me. If you’re in power, you occasionally have to be quite brutal in getting rid of your enemies and things like that. Jeremy would never do that. He allowed all of this just to go on and on. That was the real weakness of this.
Any politician who defends the rights of Palestinians or criticises the Israeli government gets smeared in this way, and an awful lot of politicians privately might agree with those criticisms but they just aren’t prepared to say it publicly because they know the abuse they’re going to get.
When I became the leader of the Greater London Council back in 1981, one of the things I wanted to do was challenge all the discrimination and prejudice we had, which was much worse then than it is now. Racism was endemic, women were subject to really appalling standards and abuse, homophobia was virtually legitimate. I think I was the first politician ever to come out with an open defence and say that lesbians and gays are just the same as all the rest of us. It caused a great storm of abuse, and so on. And that’s what I came into politics to do: challenging all the forms of discrimination, whether it’s antisemitism, homophobia,other forms of racism.
When I became the Mayor of London, we instituted a whole programme to tackle antisemitism. We held an annual commemoration for the victims of the Holocaust. The Jewish community leadership turned up. And one of the reasons behind that was to make sure that the generation now growing up know about this history. So, I’ve worked with the Jewish community, just like I worked with the Irish community back in the early ‘80s. Because, inthose days, the Irish were all being depicted as ‘supporters of terrorism and the IRA’sbombing campaign’.
And that’s just what defines me. I think, what I find interesting about all this, in all the time, 51 years since I joined the Labour Party, I only ever heard one racist comment, and that was back in 1970 where a white man in Norwood Labour Party was complaining about the song, ‘Young, Gifted and Black’.
Because, think about it, if you’re racist or an antisemite, you’re not going to join the Labour Party, because for almost a century, Labour was the traditional party of the Jewish community. We had dozens of Jewish MPs. That’s why, I think, many of us find this bizarre,trying to depict the Labour Party as ‘inherently antisemitic’.
I think one of the things that disappoints me is that many of the people who’ve worked very closely with me over the last decades have gone very quiet since all these accusations came up. And I can understand why. They see the way I’m being depicted in the media, the way Jeremy Corbyn is, they think, ‘I don’t want that, so I’ll just keep my head down’. The trouble is it won’t go away. And it will come back, and they’ll use it against you as soon as you do come out in favour of something they don’t agree with. And so, I think, we’ve got to stand up and challenge every one of these lies and smears, otherwise this can go on for decades or more.
I’m sure a lot of people must think, ‘How does Ken cope with all these allegations and smears?’. All I say is, look, I’ve had 50 years of this. But, in all these decades, never have one of these accusations been proven true and I’ve always had massive support from the community out there. When I ran as an Independent for Mayor, I got half the Labour vote, I also got 25% of the Tory vote. I think people saw me as someone who came into politics to make life better for people.
So, I’ve had all these lies and smears, but I’ve also had really good support from ordinary working class and middle class people out there on the street. And that’s how I cope with it.
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