When he was suspended from the Labour Party in September following a complaint that he had shared allegedly antisemitic content on Facebook, Haringey councillor Noah Tucker (pictured) firmly denied the charges made against him. The told the Ham & High, which had received screenshots of comments made and articles shared by Tucker, that he opposes “racism in all its forms including antisemitism” and that the Facebook material had been “selectively edited” by whoever had supplied it.
Tucker is still suspended, though there is a story, which On London cannot confirm, that Labour persons in Haringey loyal to Jeremy Corbyn who still have influence with Labour’s disciplinary machinery have been anticipating the suspension being lifted in the spring. If so, it seems possible they and Tucker will be disappointed.
This website has been sent some extracts from social media exchanges to which Tucker has contributed, different from those reported by the High & High, which appear unlikely to help his chances of being let back into the Labour fold.
One is from a WhatsApp group conversation prompted by a column by the (now former) Times columnist Philip Collins, published on 12 March this year. Its headline was: “Keir Starmer’s first task is to purge the Corbynistas. A screen grab from the group shows a person called Noah, understood to be Noah Tucker, observing: “The purging will be outsourced to people nominated by the BoD.” The initials BoD appear to be those of the Board of Deputies, as in the Board of Deputies of British Jews. An email to Tucker asking about this and the rest of the material, sent to him yesterday morning, has received no reply so far.
A more recent item appeared on a Facebook page in May of this year. It forms part of an exchange about slates of candidates for internal elections of Momentum, the pressure group formed to support the leadership of Labour by Corbyn (himself currently suspended from Labour over his stance on antisemitism in the party). In a Facebook post, Noah Tucker expressed the view that the “key problems in Momentum” were failures to help organise the Left within Labour Party structures, to “engage with the working class and the unions” and “to oppose the centrists on Brexit and antisemitism”.
There are also a couple of examples from 2019 of Tucker “likes” on Facebook. On 2 March that year, Tucker gave a thumbs up to news that a group called Labour Heartlands – which has today posted a call for Keir Starmer to be removed as Labour leader – had passed a motion calling for the reinstatement of Chris Williamson, then the Derby North MP who had just been suspended by Labour for saying the party had been “too apologetic” about antisemitism. Tucker had made his own defence of Williamson during that period and resisted calls for his resignation as a councillor. Williamson lost a subsequent appeal against his suspension and was later banned by Labour from defending his seat.
Another Tucker Facebook “like” is for a 25 June 2019 post by the former Labour MP George Galloway, in which he criticised a so-called “Deal of the Century” for the Middle East being discussed by the government of Israel and Donald Trump. Galloway, who was expelled from Labour in 2003 (and became Respect Party MP for Bethnal Green & Bow two years later) proclaimed that “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea” and called for the creation of “One Democratic bi-national state of Israel-Palestine” where “Jews Christians [and] Muslims live as equals under the law”.
In the absence of a reply from Tucker, it can perhaps be assumed that he would deny that his WhatsApp observation and Facebook post and likes indicate that he holds antisemitic views or sympathises with people who do. Others, of course, would disagree, no doubt noting that in March of this year Tucker sought to have a clause adopting a “a zero tolerance position” on antisemitism removed from a motion being considered by Tottenham Constituency Labour Party.
Tucker, who used to run a website called 21st Century Socialism which is no longer online, became a Labour councillor at a by-election in 2016, having joined the party in the wake of Corbyn becoming its leader. He was a member of the cabinet of Haringey’s Momentum-led Labour Council until May 2019, and has continued to show support for council leader Joseph Ejiofor. The material reported in this piece has been shown to the Labour Party.
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