Naz Shah, the MP for Bradford West, was suspended in April 2016 over Facebook posts from two years earlier that suggested Israelis be deported to the US. She was reinstated in July of the same year after being widely praised for the contrition she showed. Shah used a point of order in the House of Commons to apologise, saying: “Antisemitism is racism, full stop. As an MP, I will do everything in my power to build relations between Muslims, Jews and people of different faiths and none.”
Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, was suspended from the party in 2016 after he made comments about Adolf Hitler supporting Zionism. He resigned from the party in 2019 saying his suspension for alleged antisemitism had become a distraction. He maintained that his statements about the Nazi leader supporting a Jewish homeland when he first came to power were historically accurate and insisted he was not guilty of antisemitism.
Chris Williamson, then Derby North MP, was suspended from Labour in February 2019 after video footage showed him telling a meeting of Momentum that Labour’s reaction to antisemitism allegations had led to the party being “demonised” and claiming he had celebrated the resignation of the MP Joan Ryan, who quit Labour in protest over the handling of antisemitism complaints. A NEC panel reinstated him in June of the same year but, after an outcry, another panel reviewed the decision and reinstated the suspension. After losing a legal battle to be readmitted into the party, Williamson announced he was quitting the party in November 2019.
The former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was suspended from the party in October last year for saying the problem of antisemitism within Labour was “dramatically overstated for political reasons” by opponents and the media. A disciplinary panel of the party’s national executive committee (NEC) lifted the suspension the following month after he issued a conciliatory statement but Keir Starmer refused to restore the whip to Corbyn.
Howard Beckett, a member of the NEC, was suspended from the party in May after he called for the home secretary, Priti Patel, to be deported on Twitter. The tweet, in response to an attempt to deport two asylum seekers in Glasgow, read: “Priti Patel should be deported, not refugees. She can go along with anyone else who supports institutional racism. She is disgusting.” Beckett, a leadership candidate for the Unite trade union before pulling out of the race, apologised and deleted the tweet.
