Steve Cooke Profile picture
GenX leftie, vegan & occasional muso. @UKLabour & @Unitetheunion activist. Also @steve-cooke.bsky.social on Bluesky & @funkmaverick on Instagram/Threads.🎗️

Dec 5, 2020, 11 tweets

Graham Hyslop OBE is outraged by recent suspensions in the Labour Party and offers "100% support" to @JVoiceLabour. Apparently, he too is a victim of the "witch-hunt", having resigned from the party after 40 years of membership due to allegations of #antisemitism. /1

I took the opportunity to remind Graeme Hyslop OBE that he had been responsible for many antisemitic commentaries, to which he replied "nothing whatsoever about anything I do is either racist or antisemitic" and made a puzzling reference to my being "funded by a new employer". /2

I first encountered Graeme Hyslop OBE in a thread about the @BoardofDeputies's 10 Pledges on JVL's page back in January, where he accused the BoD itself of being antisemitic and called for its "influence" to be "nullified". /3

Graeme Hyslop OBE's own timeline was replete with anti-Jewish racism. Rothschild conspiracy theories, Nazi-Zionist collaboration and even claiming that Jewish Labour MP Ruth Smeeth was not only in the wrong party but in the wrong country too. I wonder which country he meant? /4

Graeme Hyslop OBE's racist rhetoric was unrelenting and he held his friend Roy Smart's take in particularly high regard. Smart is a Holocaust denier. I once foolishly tried to counsel Smart to reflect on his actions and apologise, so appreciate that Hyslop may not have known. /5

But Graeme Hyslop OBE was not sharing Roy Smart's musings on unrelated topics. The posts by Smart he commended were explicitly antisemitic in their own right. That said, it's not as if they would have stood out as anything exceptional in the midst of Hyslop's timeline. /6

I tried to challenge Graeme Hyslop OBE about his views in that JVL thread. But it was a hopeless task. /7

Graeme Hyslop OBE even tried to defend his comment that Ruth Smeeth was in the "wrong country". /8

Given Graeme Hyslop OBE's opposition to an independent body adjudicating on antisemitism complaints, I helped him out by reporting his racist posts to Labour HQ while it still controlled the process. His comment on the JVL page is the first feedback I've had on the outcome. /9

So, goodbye and good riddance to you, Graeme Hyslop OBE. Your antisemitism is not needed in the Labour Party even if it seems to fit in well with the discourse on the JVL Facebook page. /10

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