It’s all a bit Orwellian – Camden New Journal diary piece and letter
Machover Labour expulsion – it’s all a bit Orwellian
Free thinker lives in Queen’s Park
John Gulliver, Camden New Journal
13 October, 2017
Plus letter published in the same issue: The Labour Party’s expulsion of Emeritus Professor Moshé Machover must be rescinded immediately
MOSHE Machover, an eminent emeritus professor in the mysterious laws governing mathematics and logic at King’s College, London, has upset the powers-that-be in the Labour Party who have suddenly expelled him.
He got his P45 in a letter last week from a Labour official called Sam Matthews, described as Head of Disputes. All very Orwellian.
He spoke to Diary’s colleague John Gulliver on Wednesday afternoon from his Queen’s Park home and discovered their paths had crossed in the past.
They both knew Leopold Trepper, head of the anti-Nazi espionage group in Europe, called the Red Orchestra; Machover in the late 1950s and Gulliver a few years later.
Professor Machover met Trepper while completing his PhD in Warsaw.
Gulliver stayed in Trepper’s flat, and later helped a campaign to persuade the Polish government to allow him to settle in Israel.
A free-thinking man of the left, Professor Machover, 81, a member of the Hampstead & Kilburn Labour Party, laughed when he said that this is his third expulsion from left parties – the other two were in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s.
He upset Labour because he wrote an article on anti-Semitism and Zionism for the Weekly Worker which was republished as a four-page newspaper at the party’s Brighton conference.
He is accused of writing for a proscribed organisation. But is it that? Or because criticising Zionism is seen as the same as being an anti-Semite.
Now, dozens of Labour Party branches, including two in Camden and St George’s in Islington, have passed resolutions demanding he be reinstated.
The Labour Party’s expulsion of Emeritus Professor Moshé Machover must be rescinded immediately
12 October, 2017
IN an abject denial of any form of natural justice or due process, longstanding Kilburn resident and member of Hampstead & Kilburn Labour Party, Emeritus Professor Moshé Machover, has been summarily expelled from the Labour Party.
He has been formally charged with nothing and has not been called to speak in his own defence.
All this has happened in a Labour Party that prides itself on having commissioned and adopted the Chakrabarti Report which put at its forefront the need for clear, transparent disciplinary procedures, as well as for protecting free speech and encouraging “an atmosphere of civility and mutual respect”.
I have known Moshé, a lifelong Israeli socialist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist, who has lived in Britain since 1968, for nigh on 50 years, first as a founder of the Israeli Socialist Organisation Matzpen, and then as a good friend and fellow socialist activist.
On October 3 Machover received a letter out of the blue from Sam Matthews, head of disputes at the Labour Party, announcing his summary expulsion.
Two reasons were given. First, there was “an apparently anti-Semitic article” published in his name in a paper called the Labour Party Marxists (LPM). But second, on investigating this “apparent anti-Semitism”, LPM was deemed to express ideas incompatible with membership of the Labour Party.
So the charges of anti-Semitism were put on the back-burner but Machover’s new crime of association with LPM was so heinous that he was bundled out of the party without a by-your-leave.
And meanwhile the smear of being anti-Semitic is left hanging over him, a committed Israeli Jewish socialist and anti-racist.
Machover wasn’t asked if he was a member of LPM or the organisation which publishes it. In fact he isn’t, saying quite clearly, with sardonic McCarthyite echoes: “I am not and have never been a member.”
LPM asked his permission to reprint an article that had appeared a year previously in the online Weekly Worker, published by an organisation called the CPGB. He gave it “as I would allow any paper and anyone to reprint my articles”.
And though Machover has published a number of articles in the Weekly Worker, he is not a member of the organisation that publishes that either.
It is a long tradition on the left for trade union leaders, politicians and public intellectuals to write for, and participate in, open debate and discussion in papers like the Morning Star on the left, as well as in publications well to the right of the party.
There has never previously been the suggestion that willingness to engage in this free exchange of ideas automatically constitutes support for a rival political organisation, let alone is worthy of summary expulsion.
Shami Chakrabarti was explicit about the dangers of arguing guilt by association and for good reason. It would, she said, “undermine the kind of dialogue and debate that is the basis of peace, progress and greater understanding in the world”.
Yet it is precisely on these grounds that Machover has been expelled, solely for the views he has expressed and argued cogently for, in an arena suddenly deemed incompatible with membership of the Labour Party.
To restore the Labour Party’s good reputation it is essential that this Star Chamber dispensation of “justice” be brought to a swift end.
Machover’s expulsion must be rescinded immediately. If he or anyone else has charges to answer, they should be made clearly and explicitly, and investigated and resolved transparently, in the spirit of Shami Chakrabarti’s Report.
RICHARD KUPER
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