On Monday 26th October, it emerged that Former Mayor of Luton, who is currently Labour’s candidate for Bedfordshire Police and Crime Commissioner, has been suspended by the Party over alleged anti-Semitism.
Tahir Khan, who served as Mayor of Luton in 2016-17, will no longer be able to represent Labour in the 2021 election for the senior police job, and a new selection process is reportedly underway. This after it is believed that he posted Rothschild conspiracy theories on social media in the past and to have claimed that the BBC is a “Zionist channel”.
A Labour spokesman reportedly said, “The Labour Party takes all complaints of antisemitism extremely seriously and they are fully investigated in line with our rules and procedures, and any appropriate disciplinary action is taken.” On 28th May 2019, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a full statutory investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant.
In the first release of its Anti-semitism in Political Parties research, Campaign Against Antisemitism showed that Labour Party candidates for Parliament in the 2019 general election accounted for 82 percent of all incidents of antisemitic discourse by parliamentary candidates.
