Labour veteran Margaret Hodge ‘no longer feels at home’ in party thanks to anti-Semitism
LABOUR party veteran Margaret Hodge said she “didn’t feel at home” and felt a “bit of fear” about anti-Semitism in the party she has been a member for more than 50 years.
Leader Jeremy Corbyn is due to meet leaders of Jewish groups on the ongoing anti-Semitism crisis this week while Theresa May will greet a Holocaust survivor in Downing Street.
It came as the daughter of Labour MP John Mann slammed the party’s response to anti-Semitism.
Heather Mann - hit with a rape threat - said “nobody” from Labour HQ even got in touch with her.
Last week Mr Mann told the Commons how his wife had also been threatened with rape and sent a dead bird in the post.
And Special Branch officers were brought in to track his daughter’s movements following the threats.
Writing in The Sunday Times, Ms Mann said anti-Semitic abuse was now becoming “the norm”.
She said: “When my mother was sent the dead bird in 2012, party officials rightly and repeatedly ensured she was safe.
“Yet since my father raised in detail the latest threats against us in private to the parliamentary Labour Party three weeks ago, nobody from the national party has bothered to check on us. Nobody.”
Dame Hodge told Pienaar’s Politics yesterday: “I’ve never known it like this and it’s terrible to have to get up and call it out.
“I fought the BNP in 2010 and when Nick Griffin announced that he was going to be the candidate against me I thought ‘blimey, I’m going to get buckets full of anti-Semitism’ but I tell you I didn’t.
“I got a bit, but not much. I’m getting more now - and nothing like Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth and these people - and I think the reason for that is social media.”
The PM will meet holocaust survivor called Mala Tribich who is due to give a talk to No10 on her life on Thursday.
She was nine years old when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, after which members of her family were moved from ghettos to various concentration camps.
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Eventually liberated from Bergen-Belsen by the British Army in 1945, she latterly settled in the UK along with her brother Ben Helfgott, who went on to become an Olympic weightlifter.
She now works with the Holocaust Educational Trust.
Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry was yesterday asked about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and said she was “sickened” by the reports.
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