A recent UK Labour Party disciplinary panel on anti-Semitism was chaired by Stephen Marks, who Jewish Voice For Labour (JVL) once labelled an “anti-Semitism denier.”
According to the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a watchdog group dedicated to exposing and countering anti-Semitism through “education and zero-tolerance enforcement of the law,” Marks last week led a panel of three members of Labour’s National Constitutional Committee (NCC), the party’s top disciplinary body.
The committee met to discuss accusations by Sheila Peacock, the former mayor of London borough Haringey and current Labour councillor, that Councillor Vincent Carroll threatened and bribed her to leave the Labour Party, sending her a text threatening to have her “physically removed from office” and, she alleges, offering her a monetary incentive as an anti-Semitic trope because she was Jewish. He later texted her, “Money unlike for some is not my God.”
After the NCC panel cleared Carroll of the complaint, Peacock said she was “distraught.”
The Campaign Against Antisemitism noted that Marks has a long history of supporting the “institutionalization of anti-Semitism” within Labour. For instance, in 2018, Marks distributed a petition supporting David Watson, who was suspended from Labour in 2016 for sharing posts on social media comparing the Mossad to the Nazis and accusing Israel of genocide.
He was also accused by the deputy leader of Oxford City Council of saying at a meeting that, “Labour’s antisemitism problem was a fabrication of Israeli propagandists and arms dealers terrified of a Corbyn government.”
The Campaign Against Antisemitism’s "Antisemitism Barometer 2019" report found that anti-Semitism on the far left in the UK has surpassed Jew hatred on the far right.