JLM activists urged to help protect gains made under Keir Starmer
Sarah Sackman MP, and JLM chair Mike Katz and his predecessor Peter Mason, all spoke at packed JLM election victory reception
Lee Harpin is the Jewish News's political editor
A capacity turn-out for the Jewish Labour Movement’s general election victory event was unsurprising given the scale of Keir Starmer’s win on July 4th.
Sespite the largely celebratory tone, speeches from newly elected Finchley and Golders Green MP Sarah Sackman, former JLM national secretary Peter Mason, and his successor Mike Katz, also urged the group’s members to help protect the gains made under the prime minister’s leadership.
To rapturous applause, Sackman told activists:”In 2019 our party badly needed change.
“We stayed and we fought antisemtism. We helped Keir change the party so that we could earm the right to change the country.”
Sackman also spoke of her pride becoming a Jewish MP, and a minister, as solicitor general in the new government.
Current JLM chair Katz told activists that after the devastating 2019 election defeat under Jeremy Corbyn it would not have been unreasonable to have suggested Labour needed to spend “40 years in the political desert” to recover from the “shame” of the antisemitism crisis.
Praising the commitment to tackle the crisis, shown by both Starmer and deputy leader Angela Rayner, Katz told those gathered in a Westminister venue “few would have believed what has been achieved in four years.
But Mason, now the Labour leader of Ealing Council, and standing for a position on the party’s governing national executive committee in forthcoming internal elections, told activists:”We cannot allow the gains that we have made to our party, fit for purpose, and a government fit for the future, to be lost.”
He noted:”Unfortunately still too many people in our party view the business of government through the prism of scoring factional points to undermine a government that wants to be able to deliver for this country.”
Mason called on JLM members to “help protect the gains that everybody in this room has achieved.”
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