Party Cards

In 2019, Margaret Hodge was resident in Islington North, where she wrote “Antisemite” on her ballot paper rather than vote for Jeremy Corbyn, whom she had once surreptitiously recorded in the forlorn hope that he might say something anti-Semitic. She has never forgiven him for his role in exposing the rampant abuse in Islington’s children’s homes when she was Leader of the Council. So she committed an act that was and is expulsionable from the Labour Party. I for one would not want to share that distinction with her, but at the very least she ought now to lose the Labour whip in the House of Lords. If not, why not? The same question presents itself in relation to the Reform UK whip in the House of Commons. She supports the Blackshirts against the RNLI, so how could that continue to extend to Suella Braverman?

Is David Mencer still a member of the Labour Party? From a country four years younger than Hodge, he has told LBC that, “Jerusalem has always been the capital of the Jewish people, [since] London was still rubbing sticks together to make fire.” As Sohrab Ahmari, a son of a very ancient civilisation indeed, explains, “Around 1000 BC, both the people living in and around Jerusalem and those who inhabited the British Isles used the same percussive method to make fire. Both more often than not kept fires, rather than strike new ones.” But the key point is that Mencer was the Director of David Lammy’s London Mayoral campaign, which is about to be relaunched. Good luck with that.