Former Labour NEC member calls out smears

Mish Rahman is a former – and longstanding – member of the national executive committee (NEC) of the Labour party. He is now a member of the Greens. And he has outed the hypocrisy and racism of Labour’s desperate attempt to smear a London Green candidate as antisemitic.

Labour is clearly still stung by its humiliating defeat in the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election and terrified of the outcome of May 2026’s local elections. It is just as clearly still desperate to propagate the Israel lobby’s attacks on the Greens for opposing Israel’s genocide. Hence the hollow arrogance of Lewisham mayor Brenda Dacre’s blatantly electioneering letter to Green leader Zack Polanski demanding the removal of Forest Hill candidate Bernard Mani:

Dacre’s pretext for her demand is that he has apparently questioned Israel’s atrocity narrative concerning 7 October 2023. The fact that the narrative has already been completely debunked seems to have escaped her notice – or at least her computer keyboard.

But according to Rahman, who has extensive experience of Dacre when she was a Labour party functionary, her ability to ignore facts has previously protected racists, rather than attack opponents of genocide. In a post on X, he recounted one such experience:

Labour and bigotry

Appalling. But Dacre is anything but an anomaly in her party, which has a long record of anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-Roma racism.

The Labour Muslim Network published a damning report on the rampant Islamophobia among the Labour right. Keir Starmer and his sidekick David Evans promised to immediately implement all the LMN report’s recommendations, but two years later LMN had to report that the situation continued unabated and was so serious that most Muslim party members had no confidence in Starmer or his interest in tackling the issue. Three years later still, and Starmer is no better.

Anti-Black racism, meanwhile, has run riot among the Labour right, with whole swathes of Black councillors deselected – in at least one case, involving the removal of every Black councillor in a London borough. Unlike the Abbott suspension, the issue was ignored by the so-called ‘mainstream’ media. In 2026, Starmer’s party is busy trying to normalise it across UK society.

And MPs who made or propagated grossly racist comments against Gypsy Roma people went unpunished by the party and were even appointed to Starmer’s front bench. Those who hound left-wing Muslim and Black MP women MPs, by contrast, are enabled and protected.

So rampant was the issue and so uninterested was the leadership in doing anything about it that in 2021, Black party members went on campaign ‘strike’ in protest – and in 2022, black MPs and activists protested publicly against the leadership’s complete inaction over the racist abuses highlighted in the Forde report.

Even on the issue of antisemitism, Starmer and co are selective: while left-wingers including many Jews are thrown out of the party for legitimate criticism of Israel or even for wanting to discuss the so-called ‘IHRA working definition’, right-wingers who have made clearly antisemitic statements have been allowed to remain on the front bench or even promoted.

Polanski’s record of tackling Israel lobby smears head on suggests that he will tell – may already have told – the desperate Labour mayor to stick her demands somewhere sunlight doesn’t reach. He certainly should.

Featured image via the Canary