Guardian Dave Hill’s Blog: Brian Coleman, his ‘blackshirts’ email and Jewish Barnet
Brian Coleman, the famously outspoken London Conservative, has been ruled by a Barnet Council standards sub-committee to have broken the council’s members’ code of conduct by sending emails calling an Israeli member of the public “disloyal” to his own country, and another correspondent that he supposed she would have “been in theblackshirts,” 70 years ago, when responding to their concerns about a multinational company which has a commercial contract with Israel.
He has been ordered to apologise but reportedly declined as yet to do so, vowing instead to appeal against the decision. For Coleman, a long-standing Barnet councillor, this affair is not about discourtesy of a rather pronounced kind but what he described at his hearing as a “rising tide” of antisemitism in the borough.
Here’s the background. Ron Cohen, the Israeli correspondent, and Dr Charlotte Jago wrote to Coleman in his capacity as Barnet’s cabinet member for the environment and one of its representative on the North London Waste Authority asking him to take into account their views about the multinational environmental services company Veolia, whose transport division has constructed a light railway system in Jerusalem. This includes a link to a settlement on disputed land, resulting in Veolia becoming the object of a boycott campaign. The waste authority had invited bids to develop a new waste facility at the Pinkham Way site, which is in Barnet. Veolia already supplies services in London.
Coleman, who also sits on the London Assembly representing the constituency of Barnet and Camden and is London mayor Boris Johnson’s appointee as chair of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA), had already been judged by an independent investigator, Keith Stevens, who was appointed by Barnet Council, to have broken the conduct code.
In his report, delivered last November, Stevens concluded that the complainants’ emails to Coleman were “courteous” and that they were “perfectly entitled to send them,” and that Coleman’s replies had, in the case of Cohen, “crossed the line into deliberate personal, offensive and insulting abuse” that he “would have known…would cause hurt and distress to an Israeli” and, in the case of Jago, been “rude and personally offensive, unfair and unreasonable, and amounted to an expression of anger and personal, demeaning abuse.”
Stevens, who has served as county secretary and solicitor to Sufollk County Council and senior ethical standards adviser to the Chartererd Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, noted that Coleman, who is a strong supporter of Israel and strident critic of pro-Palestinian campaigns, characterised Jago in his reply to her as “anti-Zionist” and “equated anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism.” Last April Coleman complainedof “a nasty, unpleasant, organised campaign against Veolia and their possible participation in the NLWA procurement process.” He said this was “motivated by anti-Zionist sentiments by some residents of the borough, which in my book amounts to anti-Semitism.”
The report found Coleman to also be in breach of the code of conduct by failing to co-operate with his inquiries. “The respondent [Coleman] has shown no insight into the effect of his conduct has had, no recognition [and] no contrition,” Stevens wrote. Complaints by two other Barnet residents who had corresponded with Coleman about Veolia were not upheld by Stevens, though the investigator said it was “of concern” that Coleman told one of the unsuccessful complainants, Roger Higginson, that, “I shall not be taking the slightest notice of your views.”
On Monday the standards sub-committee agreed with Stevens about the Coleman emails. It’s not the first time Coleman’s breached the code. Two years ago the same conclusion was reached after Coleman sent an email to Barnet resident Roger Tichborne, who writes the Barnet Eyeblog, calling him “an obsessive, poisonous individual,” and his track record for giving people electronic pieces of his mind was further lengthened last October when it emerged that he’d told a local single mother seeking his help with a housing problem to “live in the real world.”
Yet Coleman places this latest episode in a different category. “This isn’t just Coleman being Coleman,” as he put it to me during a phone conversation last year with what I found a quite disarming self-awareness. He made plain then, as before and since, that he believes himself a target of a thoroughly nasty political campaign and is responding accordingly.
As Roger Tichborne reports Coleman has secured some passionate backing for this stance, one which might also be understood in the context of the London elections. Coleman’s Labour challenger for the Barnet and Camden assembly seat is Andrew Dismore, who was removed as a local MP at the last general election by the tiniest of margins and has been bullish about his chances of unseating Coleman.
Dismore’s c.v. also includes being a vice chair of Labour Friends of Israel and the driving parliamentary force behind the founding of Holocaust Memorial Day. Barnet contains many Jewish residents, comprising 17.5% of all Jewish Britons in 2001, according to the census of that year. It will be a distinctive and interesting campaign.
