Applying The Brake

Sunny Hundal writes:

A top Lib Dem MP has resigned from the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) after questions were raised about comments made by senior executives from the controversial think-tank. In an email passed on to Liberal Conspiracy, Tom Brake MP, also the Deputy Leader of the House of Commons, said: “I am contacting the HJS to ask to be taken off their Advisory Council.”

The HJS has come under sustained criticism recently for remarks made by senior executives Douglas Murray and Alan Mendoza. Douglas Murray complained in March 2013 that London had “become a foreign country” because white Britons were a minority in 23 of 33 London boroughs. He added: 

We long ago reached the point where the only thing white Britons can do is to remain silent about the change in their country. Ignored for a generation, they are expected to get on, silently but happily, with abolishing themselves, accepting the knocks and respecting the loss of their country. 

This isn’t the first time Murray has been criticised for controversial comments. At an event in 2011 he said of the English Defence League: 

If you’re ever going to have a grassroots response for non-Muslims to Islamism, that would be how you’d want it, surely. 

He went on to praise Robert Spencer, author of Jihad Watch (an anti-Muslim website), who was recently raising legal funds for the English Defence League’s leader Tommy Robinson. The Henry Jackson Society’s chief executive Alan Mendoza expressed similar views in March 2013 at a US conference of the lobby group AIPAC.

Labour MPs have been urged to cut their ties with the Henry Jackson Society by a growing number of voices – most recently by Left Foot Forward editor James Bloodworth. Eleven Labour MPs are still associated with this organisation. How, one wonders, do the views of the Henry Jackson Society sit with one-nation Labour?

Lib Dem MP Tom Brake has become the first MP to distance himself from the organisation, but may not be the last.