Parachute Luke
In September 2022 two Labour activists were elected to the party’s governing body, the National Executive Council.
One was Luke Akehurst, the pro-Israel director of the right wing We Believe In Israel group which supports Keir Starmer.
The other was Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, media officer of the pro-Palestinian Jewish Voice for Labour and a former Reuters journalist.
Today Luke Akehurst is the Labour candidate for the safe seat of North Durham, “parachuted” in by the Starmer-controlled NEC without any local involvement.
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is out in the cold, expelled from Labour for trying to discuss the party’s increasing McCarthyism.
The contrast between the treatment of the two NEC members underlines Starmer’s increasingly ruthless cull of left wingers …
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi was elected as the last of the nine Constituency Labour Party representatives on Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) in September 2022.
Luke Akehurst, already an NEC member, came top of the poll.
Three weeks later Wimborne Idrissi was suspended for speaking at a meeting which had taken place almost a year earlier.
This meant she was unable to take up her place on the NEC.
The meeting — “McCarthyism and Starmer’s Labour Party” — took place during the Brighton conference in September 2021.
Among the organisers were three groups that had been banned by the party in July 2021 — Labour in Exile Network (LIEN), Labour Against the Witch-hunt (LAW) and Resist.
Wimborne Idrissi spoke on behalf of Jewish Voice for Labour.
One of the other speakers was Brian Cathcart, co-founder of Hacked Off and a former Reuters colleague of Wimborne Idrissi.
On the day she was suspended, Wimborne Idrissi tweeted:
No link of course to my appearance in [Al Jazeera’s] #LabourFiles series exposing multiple abuses within Labour. First one out tonight.
“The Labour Files,” produced by Al Jazeera’s award-winning Investigations Unit, was based on an enormous leak of internal party documents.
(Press Gang’s recent “Evans Above” article on Labour general secretary David Evans was partly based on its revelations).
The NEC expelled Wimborne Idrissi on 15 December 2022. It was her 70th birthday.
Within hours the decision had been leaked to the Jewish News reporter Lee Harpin who cited “multiple sources”.
We asked Luke Akehurst, who attended the NEC meeting, if he was one of those sources. He said:
I would never disclose information to anyone about confidential Labour Party disciplinary processes.
Labour Party rules are clear — disciplinary proceedings should be confidential until the process was complete. Wimborne Idrissi’s appeal was later rejected.
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She told Press Gang:
Why did the party machine wait nearly a full year before taking any disciplinary action against me?
Was it their intention to turn a blind eye to my participation in the meeting, expecting that my campaign for election to the NEC would fail?
Did they change their minds when I got elected, fearing that I would become a thorn in the side of the Starmer machine?
Reacting to her suspension, a Momentum spokesperson said:
This is yet another abuse of process by [Keir] Starmer’s Labour. Naomi was elected by members just weeks ago, but the Labour machine has wasted no time in working to undermine party democracy. This wave of proscriptions and suspensions is at odds with natural justice and basic principles of free speech.
Ambitious …
Luke Akehurst has always wanted to be a Labour MP — he was the party’s unsuccessful candidate for Aldershot (2001) and Castle Point in Essex (2005).
He was a councillor in the London Hackney borough from 2002 to 2014.
He was identified as a possible candidate to replace Diane Abbott in the safe Hackney North and Stoke Newington seat.
When she decided to stand again, he was quickly selected for the safe North Durham seat.
Secrecy surrounds the way he was chosen — even many NEC members are in the dark.
Yesterday Akehurst declined to answer the following questions:
— who was on the panel of NEC members who selected him?
— were any of these members also selected as candidates by panels on which he sat?
He said these were question for Labour to answer.
Labour did not reply to our questions.
Ultra-Zionist
Akehurst has always been a die-hard supporter of Israel — whatever it does.
When he was a councillor in Hackney, he was a fierce opponent of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
In 2011 he became director of We Believe in Israel which was the “pro-Israel advocacy organisation” of the British Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom).
Little is known about We Believe In Israel — for more than ten years there appear to be no available accounts.
It only became a separate company in 2022. Its financial statements for that year reveal a small enterprise with “reserves” of minus £493 and just three employees, including Akehurst.
Last night Luke Akehurst told Press Gang that We Believe in Israel:
… was part of Bicom from 2011 to 2022. It is now a wholly separate company with no legal connection to Bicom. It did not have separate accounts before 2022 as it was merely a brand owned by Bicom.
In 2009 the Guardian reported that Bicom “has become one of the most persistent and slickest media operations in the battle for influence over opinion formers”.
Its major funder was the Finnish multi-millionaire Poju Chaim Zabludowicz whose family fortune was based on the Israeli arms company Soltam, now a subsidiary of Elbit.
Elbit’s UK subsidiaries have been the target of the Palestine Action network for supplying arms to Israel’s armed forces.
Luke Akehurst said that Zabludowic is no longer connected with either Bicom or We Believe In Israel.
Bicom is a relatively small outfit. In 2022-2023 most of its £288,028 turnover was spent on its five employees and outside consultants.
The balance sheet showed a deficit of minus £2,000.
The organisation’s current team have strong connections with Israel.
Bicom’s biography of director Richard Pater says he joined the organisation “from the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, where he spearheaded the engagement with the foreign press”.
After the 2006 Second Lebanon War, he received the Prime Minister’s prize for excellence.
He’s also a former officer in the Israel Defence Forces’ armoured brigade, “where he twice received commendations,” and continues to serve in the reserves.
Bicom declined to answer our questions about whether he had served in the Israel’s current invasion of Gaza and its operations in the occupied West Bank.
Another Bicom official is the Jerusalem-based Calev Ben Dor.
His Bicom biography says he moved to Israel in 2005 after working in the Public Affairs Department of the Israeli Embassy in London.
He was Bicom’s Director of Research from between 2015 and 2019 before moving to his current senior research associate role.
Bicom says he:
… worked for several years in the Policy Planning Division of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and additionally as a senior analyst in the National Security team of the Reut Institute, a non-partisan Tel Aviv-based strategy group.
The Reut Institute has been criticised for its opposition to the BDS movement.
Given the relatively small size of both Bicom and We Believe In Israel compared with its reputation as one of the slickest PR outfits in the UK, Press Gang asked if any of its work is actually done by Israel’s “information” divisions in Israel and in the London embassy.
Akehurst said both Bicom and We Believe In Israel:
… are small organisations that do their own work without any assistance from the Israeli government
We asked Bicom what Pater’s IDF rank was and the circumstances that led to the commendations.
We asked if he has served in the current Israeli invasion Gaza and the crackdown on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
We also asked if Calev Ben Dor had any connection with the IDF.
There was no reply.
The member for Israel?
In a week’s time Luke Akehurst is likely to be the new MP for Durham North and the Israel lobby in Britain will have a formidable defender in Parliament.
His almost unconditional support for Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians has come under fire — see, for example, this Novara Media article.
Akehurst’s links with the Israeli embassy in London have also been the subject of criticism.
In 2017 the Al Jazeera Investigations’ series “The Lobby” revealed Akehurst’s connections with the Israeli Embassy official Shai Masot.
Masot — who was caught on camera plotting to engineer a scandal to topple Tory Foreign Minister Sir Alan Duncan, an outspoken critic of Israel — said:
… Luke Akehurst is the director of We Believe in Israel. He’s a great guy … I know him, he’s a great friend.
He’s one of the best in the inside. In all the party. Seriously, there is not a lot of people like him.
Masot was later sent home in disgrace.
Luke Akehurst complained to Ofcom that Al Jazeera’s undercover footage of Masot had been “heavily edited” to misrepresent the facts.
The regulator dismissed the complaint noting that “the editing was very limited” and that “the program was an accurate reflection of what was said.”
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