Labour candidate defends describing UN as antisemitic and Jewish people as ‘politically Black’

Luke Akehurst has been selected as the Labour candidate for North Durham (Picture: In Pictures via Getty Images)

The Labour candidate for a safe seat in the north of England has defended describing the United Nations as antisemitic in a post on social media.

Luke Akehurst, who sits on Labour’s National Executive Committee, also stood behind a tweet which asked: ‘Aren’t Jews politically black?’

His selection for the North Durham seat was met with criticism from pro-Palestine accounts online.

Until recently, Mr Akehurst – who is not Jewish – was the director of campaign group We Believe In Israel, which aims to broaden support for Israel in the UK.

In an interview with Metro this evening, he explained that he was ‘handing in his notice’ in order to focus on ‘the social and economic issues that are facing people in Chester-le-Street and Stanley’.

When Mr Akehurst’s candidacy was announced, several users on X pointed out that a hundreds of his tweets appeared to have been recently deleted.

He told Metro: ‘It’s quite standard that people that are standing for public office or even applying for a new job might delete tweets to give – you know, if you’re running in an election – not give your opponents a large library of things that they can quote out of context.

‘I started to do that, and then I discovered that it would take 14 days for me to delete the 62,000 tweets that I’ve ever made. So I hit cancel after the first 1000 or whatever.

‘I didn’t target particular ones to delete. It just did them in chronological order, I think. I started a task and realised it was fruitless.’

A tweet from Mr Akehurst asking if Jewish people are ‘politically Black’ was widely shared online (Picture: X)

Among the since-deleted posts that resurfaced after news of his selection was announced was one in which he suggested Jewish people are ‘politically Black’.

Mr Akehurst said this ‘is quite common as a position that people would take in discourse about race’.

He said it concerned ‘a debate about whether you would say that “Black” is a physical description and a narrow description of a of an ethnicity or whether Blackness is a political concept about being victimised by racism by white people’.

‘When I was an activist in student politics, people of Chinese origin or Jewish origin or Gypsy or Irish origin would describe themselves as politically black,’ he added.

Diane Abbott is at the centre of a row over whether she can stand in the seat she has held since 1987 (Picture: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

In an apparent reference to Labour’s Diane Abbott, he said: ‘There’s been a very high profile incident of a quite famous MP who kind of suggested that the racism that different groups of people suffer from is qualitatively different.

‘And I’m suggesting the opposite, which is that all racism is appalling.’

In a letter to the Observer last year, Ms Abbott said Jewish, Irish and Traveller people do not face racism ‘all their lives’.

She later apologised and withdrew her remarks.

In another tweet, which has not been deleted from the platform, Mr Akehurst answers ‘yes’ when asked if he believes the UN is antisemitic.

He said that it was not unusual for Israel’s supporters ‘to believe that the United Nations is very, very biased against Israel and that some of that bias could be motivated by anti-semitism from some member states’, adding: ‘Because there’s countries that express antisemitic sentiments towards Israel. Like, Iran will bring motions against it.’

The candidate continued: ‘That’s not a position that everyone in the Labour Party would share, but it is one that I expressed in in my previous job and I’m happy to articulate it.’

Asked how he would respond to online accusations that he is not sympathetic towards Palestinians, Mr Akehurst told Metro: ‘I would reject that as someone that visits the region a lot, like historically two or three times a year.

‘I’m sympathetic to everyone that’s suffering in the conflict. I both know the communities that were destroyed on on October 7 – I’d literally had lunch in Kfar Aza in July last year, so it’s incredibly personal for me – and then I meet Palestinians a lot because I take people to Palestinian refugee camps when we do tours.

‘We don’t we don’t go to Gaza for safety reasons, this is in my old job, we visit the West Bank and visit refugee camps.

‘So the idea that I’m not sympathetic to people suffering on both sides in a really horrific conflict is terrible. That’s an accusation that I refute. I want the war to end and I want a two-state solution the same as everyone in the Labour Party does.’

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