THE chair of the Labour Party has said she can give a “cast iron assurance” that no “undue pressure” was put on the Speaker of the House of Commons over a vote on the Gaza conflict last week.
Anneliese Dodds told GB News: “I can give you a cast iron assurance that there was absolutely no undue pressure at all from the Labour Party around what took place last week.
“I did certainly share the public’s concern at the scenes that we saw and we saw, of course, lots of MPs walking out of the chamber. I think that was incredibly disappointing, because these are really important issues.
“There are many people in our country who are desperately concerned about what’s happening in the Middle East, it is important that Parliament is able to give a view on this and obviously last week, Labour tried to build a consensus around that, that was why we set out that motion which we believed could actually provide consensus around these issues.”
In a discussion during Breakfast with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster, she added: “Unfortunately, however, both the Conservatives and the SNP decided to walk out of the chamber. I don’t think that was the House of Commons at its best. I don’t want to see that kind of thing happening again.
“If the issue does come back again, to be discussed in Parliament, we again would be seeking consensus. We think it’s important that on these issues, on policy issues, that we actually have an approach from the UK which is based on consensus, and which enables us to use our role, really our diplomatic role, to its full potential.”
She added: “Keir Starmer has made it his personal mission to make sure that Labour Party is rid of anti-Semitism. I’ve worked with him as party chair over the last few years on this.
“We’ve put in place a completely new complaint system. We’ve totally overhauled our processes and quite rightly too and that’s meant that whenever there has been any indication that any of our members or our politicians have been engaged in prejudice based behaviour we’ve immediately acted on it.
“We haven’t hung back. Now as I said, I’ve written to the Conservative Party seven times over the last three years. They’ve not acted on this. And that is a really in clear contrast with what’s happened with Labour under Keir Starmer.
“There is a changed Labour Party now under Keir Starmer but we’ve not seen that kind of leadership unfortunately with Rishi Sunak and it just seems to be that he’s too weak to act on these kinds of issues.”
