The Labour Party brings to mind any number of Yiddish expressions — most of them involving the performance of lavatorial functions — but none more so than the proverb Der mentsh trakht un Got lakht. Man plans and God laughs.
The Almighty’s black humour is surely at work in the resignation of Christine Shawcroft, chair of the Labour Party disputes panel. The woman responsible for rooting out anti-Semitism has been caught defending a council candidate accused of posting Holocaust-denying content on social media. In a leaked internal email, Shawcroft called for Peterborough’s Alan Bull to be reinstated after suspension for ‘a Facebook post taken completely out of context and alleged to show anti-Semitism’. One of Bull’s alleged posts read ‘International Red Cross report confirms the Holocaust of six million Jews is a hoax’ and a link to a neo-fascist website, Renegade Tribune. Bull insists screenshots of his Facebook page have been doctored.
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