On 18 September 2019 Tower Hamlets Mayor John Biggs and all the councillors in attendance left the chamber during a full council meeting, rather than face a protest by Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! and the Revolutionary Communist Group against the council’s decision to ban the Big Ride for Palestine from holding a rally in Tower Hamlets. The Big Ride for Palestine is a charity which since 2015 has raised almost £150,000 for sports equipment for children in Gaza. However, the ride was not allowed to finish in any Tower Hamlets park and organisers were told that the speakers might express views which contradicted the council’s policies on community cohesion and equality.
The real reason, confirmed by internal council emails released following a Freedom of Information request by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, is that the council was scared that the event and its organisers could be considered to have breached the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s definition of antisemitism, which the council had voted unanimously to adopt in September 2018. It has also emerged that the council sent a list of the proposed speakers to the Metropolitan Police asking if they were ‘extremist’.
After these facts came out, John Biggs said that he was asking for a review of how the decision was made. But none of this was on the agenda of the full council meeting.
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The maintenance of the state of Israel requires the continual denial of political and human rights to the Palestinian people. We oppose all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism, but the IHRA definition was not put in place to fight racism, but to censor criticism of the racist, Zionist state of Israel, and to silence those campaigning in solidarity with the Palestinian demand for statehood.
A hundred years ago, Poplar council (now within the current Tower Hamlets council) was a very different place. In 1919, the Labour administration undertook a comprehensive programme of social reform and poor relief, including equal pay for women and a minimum wage for council workers in excess of the market rate. It was funded from the rates. In 1921 with the threat of a rise in rates, the council decided not to collect the money. Faced with opposition from higher authorities, the council organised a march of 2,000 supporters with a banner that read ‘Poplar Borough Council marching to the High Court and possibly to prison’. Thirty councillors, including six women, one of whom was pregnant, were sent to prison indefinitely for contempt of court. Today’s Tower Hamlets council is a disgrace and brings shame on this history of resistance in the East End.
Tower Hamlets council has just become the first known council in Britain to openly use the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism to censor public solidarity action with Palestine.
As we rose from our seats in the public gallery to challenge the council, our speeches, chants and placards made it completely clear why we were there, but not one councillor had the integrity to stay in the chamber to respond to us. None of them had the courage to say that they too stand with the Palestinian people. Shame on Tower Hamlets Council, the Labour Party and all those who defend the racist settler Zionist state of Israel!
Come to the RCG’s public meeting on IHRA, Palestine and Labour on 1 October, 7pm, SOAS University Room 4429.
