The decision to expel Jackie Walker from membership, and the whole process leading up to this shameful conclusion, are a travesty of justice.
The Party has enabled a process in which a principled and fearless member has been persecuted by violation of trust, by media campaign, through bullying by senior members within the party, and by a seriously flawed process which has allowed racist commentary on her person to form part of the charge against her.
Jackie Walker is not the only member to have suffered from this cavalier attitude to due process and natural justice, though hers is perhaps the most egregious case. Why have those in positions of influence within the Party who have access to the megaphone of the mass media not been reined in? Why indeed have they not been charged with bringing the Party into disrepute, which they have surely done?
It does not bring the Party into disrepute to criticise a deeply flawed definition of antisemitism. It does not bring the Party into disrepute to call for the Party to live up to its principles and abhor all racisms without gradations of importance, all holocausts without exception. What brings the Party into disrepute is to suppress free expression in order to appease the powerful.
JVL believes that the Party will before long come to be deeply ashamed of this passage in its history.
