The Labour Party have recently been reaching out to former party donors who turned their back on the party under the Corbyn leadership. On Tuesday, the Guardian revealed that one such donor was property developer David Abrahams, who regularly posts offensive and Islamophobic comments on Twitter and that Muslim groups and members of Labour’s National Executive Committee had contacted Starmer urging him to return the donations.
Novara Media have also been debating the troubling direction that the Labour Party seems to be taking under Keir Starmer’s leadership and have discovered that Abrahams is not shy of making openly racist comments and also that Abraham’s relationship with the party also appears to be based on a cash-for-favours style arrangement.
Interestingly, one rather observant Twitter commentator also noticed that Abrahams conveniently managed to get out of a tight spot with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) back in 2007, after he had been accused of breaking electoral law by using proxies to donate £630k to Labour party and that, oddly enough, Starmer was head of the CPS while Abrahams was being investigated. Matt Thomas (@Trickyjabs), broke it down rather nicely….
2007: David Abrahams breaches electoral law using proxies to donate £630k to Labour party
2008: Keir Starmer appointed head of CPS
2009: CPS announces no charges to be made against David Abrahams
2020: David Abrahams donates to Keir Starmer’s Labour party
Incidentally, Abrahams also had a political career in the Labour Party. He was a Labour Cllr on Tyne and Wear County Council between 1979 and 1985. He was also selected to stand as a parliamentary candidate in 1992 (Richmond, Yorkshire) and then again in 1997 (for the safe Labour seat of Wansbeck near Newcastle) but was unsuccessful on both occasions. We can only speculate but some in the party might have felt that prosecuting a Labour donor who also happens to have been an ex-Labour Cllr and twice selected PLP candidate, including under Blair’s stewardship in 1997, might just have been a tad too embarrassing for the Party?
Also, for the sake of adding some further context, according to Wiki, in 2008, Abraham became Vice President of Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British defence and security think tank based in Whitehall. Remember folks, this was literally the year after he’d been accused of breaking electoral law (in 2007) and presumably while he was still under investigation by Starmer’s CPS.
Novara also explain that Abrahams, as a property developer, appeared to have received a great deal of special treatment by Blair’s New Labour in exchange for donations to the party. We can therefore also speculate that another reason why Abrahams withdrew funding from the party might have been because, under Corbyn, this arrangement was unlikely to continue.
At this point, I think it’s worth summarising some of the highly offensive, racist and Islamophobic remarks that David Abrahams had posted on social media account….
- Muslims have “mixed loyalties”
- The Muslim culture is inherently violent
- Muslim Youth have a propensity for suicide
- Don’t think I know how to divide political Islam from moderates and fundamentalists… it’s the very nature of the beast!
- In January this year he wrote about the Holocaust anniversary – “Jews picked themselves up and built a brand new hi-tech state with new inventions to benefit mankind. Close neighbours chose terrorism and invented suicide bombers”
- According to Abrahams, Jews who don’t support Israel are self-hating. He previously tweeted “the worst offenders are self-hating Jews. We have too many of them!”
- In 2018, when a black woman was racially abused on a Ryanair flight, instead of simply reporting the incident and expressing his sympathy, in a classic case of Trumpish ‘whataboutery’ he used the story to talk about a completely unrelated event in the US where he claimed a white man was nearly lynched by a mob on a bus.
- In 2017, he tweeted a comment to President Zuma claiming most black South Africans preferred white rule apartheid.
It’s worth pointing out that Abrahams has subsequently deleted his Twitter account and refused to offer any further comment on the matter. It might also be worth noting that Abrahams was previously Vice-Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, Acting Director of Labour Friends of Israel and on the Executive of the Trade Union Friends of Israel.
