Chris Williamson: ‘A hostile foreign government has mobilised its assets in UK’

Former Labour MP Chris Williamson has launched an astonishing attack on “hostile” Israeli diplomats in a video posted to his Twitter account, in which he claimed to have won his legal battle against the Party.

Contrary to reports last month, he said Labour had been ordered to pay his legal costs for “unlawfully” re-suspending him, and promised to use the money to set up a fund for those he said had been subject to “manufactured antisemitism smears”.

Williamson lost his deposit in Derby North last week after winning only 635 seats while standing as an independent. Labour had earlier suspended him after he said the Party had been too apologetic when it came to antisemitism.

In his latest broadside, posted to Twitter, he said: “A hostile foreign government has mobilised its assets in the UK – which Israeli diplomats call their ‘power multiplier’ – in an attempt to prevent a Corbyn-led Labour government.”

He added: “Their secondary goal was always to blunt the internationalism in our movement and normalise Zionism in the Labour Party. They’ve done this by terrifying activists, coordinating with anti-Corbyn journalists and MPs, and using faith organisations, many of them charities, to promote the antisemitism narrative.

“First they said ‘anti-Zionism is antisemitism,’ then they said ‘anti-capitalism is antisemitism.’ In this election they’ve sought to prevent dozens of anti-imperialist socialists from standing for Labour.”

He continued: “Instead of fighting interference in our election, and calling out this outrageous assault on our democracy, the Labour Party has internalised the narrative promoted by the far-right Israeli government.”

In the video posted online on Tuesday, he added that he would not let “apologists for apartheid” dictate what it means to be anti-racist before vowing to use the money raised by crowd-funding to set up the Left Legal Fighting Fund.

Williamson claimed that his High Court victory was won “weeks ago” but said: “I’m announcing it now as I hoped to spare Labour adverse publicity during the election.”