The Friends of Greville Janner

Francis Carr Begbie
Occidental Observer
April 24, 2015

With the clamour of protest over the decision not to prosecute one of Britain’s most senior Jewish politicians over child rape allegations showing no sign of abating, it is worthwhile looking back at the career of the man at the centre.

Even without these lurid claims, Greville Janner must rank as one of the most unpopular specimens to ooze his way onto Parliament’s famous green benches.

With his pink carnation, clammy handshake and faint after burn of eau-de-cologne, his grinning approach was guaranteed to send a shiver down the spines of the toughest parliamentarians, even in his own Labour Party.

Nevertheless, this ingratiating, limp-wristed flatterer has prospered over the decades of his slithering along the corridors of power, not least due to his astute playing of the Jewish ethnic card.

His modus operandi was as a backroom operator, a Mr Fixit, a dispenser of favours and passer-on of messages. He was one of those types who would insist on doing someone a favour whether it was wanted or not. In his autobiography he says it was his mother who taught him his most important political lesson — there are few problems that could not be solved with a quiet word in the right ear.

Indeed, his own political career was launched by a backroom deal. The lifelong Londoner effectively inherited his Midlands constituency from his father after a dubious, secretive process which infuriated many local Labour Party members.

When it came to weaselling himself into the favour of a powerful figures, he displayed a sublime talent. A favoured tactic was to lobby some prominent figure for recognition for another one, especially in the Jewish community.  Here, he lobbies the Archbishop of Canterbury for an honour for the Chief Rabbi. There, he buttonholes a passing government minister and suggests an honour for a Jewish businessman.

From the beginning of his career a number of distinct themes have dominated his working life. One of the least savoury as it turns out was his close interest in the welfare of young boys who fall into the care system, and to that end he is a longstanding member of the Boy Scouts Association.

But the main one is his overriding commitment to the Jewish people.  That has been his main priority and he claims it stems from his experience as Britain’s youngest war crime investigator when he was in Germany just after the war.

As far as his own constituency of Leicester West was concerned, Janner was clearly more concerned about the welfare of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent than he was about the native White community or, as he puts it in his book, the “battle against racism and anti-Semitism is at the core of my life’s work”.

From the moment he was elected in 1970, Janner set about making himself indispensible to the fast-growing Indian community. At the time Britain was in the middle of a refugee crisis when Ugandan dictator Idi Amin threw all the Indian immigrants out of his country.

Under Britain’s Commonwealth and Nationality laws, a disastrous overhang from the days of Empire, these Indians were technically British subjects and entitled to come and stay in Britain. The laws had been drawn up as an administrative convenience and it had never been envisaged that Indians would ever leave their own country.  But in the sixties they began arriving in Britain in vast numbers. Many converged on Leicester to the alarm of the town’s native White population.

Leicester soon became the scene of racial discord and Whites took to the streets to vent their anger at being swamped by a foreign influx they had never been consulted about.  Labour Party voters deserted for the assertive new nationalist party, the National Front.

For Janner this was an opportunity to show where his loyalties — such as they were — really lay.  In his memoir he recalls inviting the Indian community to a meeting and telling them he stood “shoulder to shoulder” with them against the native White opposition.

“I am a Jew and half my family were destroyed by racists. I am an expert in discrimination.”  Said the privately-educated, Oxford and Harvard graduate who had inherited his father’s parliamentary seat.

In a breathtaking passage aimed directly at the White people he was paid to represent, he describes a conversation with a non-Asian school head teacher.  He claims that the unnamed head teacher said “They have raised the intelligence in my school.”  The sheer contempt for the native White population in that remark is unmistakable.

Gleefully, he remembered how he dismissed the objections of the native Whites. He writes “I was determined to battle against some of my indigenous constituents dislike of the unlike…”  And enthusiastically he took up the fight against his own White constituents.

In 1971 Leicester council placed an advert in Kampala newspapers saying Leicester was full but this did nothing to stem the immigration flow. Janner recalls:   “The Leicester Mercury and the local police were my allies in keeping the local National Front and the fascists at bay. In local elections in 1977 the National Front only missed gaining a seat in one of my housing estates by a few votes. ‘Enough’ I said to my Labour colleagues. We recognised that the estate was almost entirely white. They were afraid of people they had never met. The National Front seemed their natural ally. We must expose them. “ he recalled.

His access to Jewish network of contacts and big money proved crucial, and it is here he reveals an episode of extremely dubious legality. “I consulted the (Jewish) Board of Deputies. They had recently produced a wonderful pamphlet with the bold slogan on the front. ‘The National Front’ is a Nazi front’. We put one into every letter box on the estate. The local fascists cringed and never received the same level of votes again.” In fact a police prosecution of far-left activists did take place for circulating literature in contravention of election laws.

One of the NF candidates threatened to sue for libel, with the result that Janner took a Jewish high street retail millionaire called Stanley Kalms up to Leicester for a visit. Janner claims in his book that Kalms promised to underwrite any court action. Lord Kalms was later to become a huge contributor to the Conservative Party — a good example of how common Jewish interests override trifling party considerations.

With Janner’s support, the Indian surge continued and by 1976 around 40,000 Asians from India and Pakistan had flooded into Leicester and comprised about 20% of the population. Janner freely admits he came to depend on the Indian community for his election majorities. National Front council votes were as high as 30% in local elections.

Janner repaid Stanley Kalms’ support by lobbying furiously for him to receive first a knighthood and then a peerage. This finally paid off in 2004 when Kalms entered the House of Lords as Baron Kalms of Edgeware, better known as Lord Kalms.

As if so often the case with Jewish politicians, the diversity Janner was so keen to impose on his constituents did not extend to his own circle or even his private office. From his numerous business partners to the researchers he used throughout his parliamentary career, he seems to have hired or worked with only other Jews and used gentiles solely for admin and other menial roles.

It has been frequently pointed out in TOO that the Jewish community is forgiving of Jews who run afoul of the law. Disgraced Jewish businessmen  frequently double-down on their ethnic identity by suddenly developing a deep interest in the cause of Israel and Jewish charities.

Janner has been able to turn this dubious and transparent tactic to great profit. Time and again he has provided his services as a political fig leaf to shady businessmen — for a price, of course.

One was the London casino magnate Cyril Stein who had his gaming licence revoked for disreputable practices in the 1970s when magistrates said he was not a “fit and proper” person. Janner was happy to accept a non-executive seat on the board of Stein’s Ladbrokes betting shop chain which he boasted paid more than his parliamentary salary.

The second involved another millionaire businessman called Gerald Ronson who was jailed for a year for his part in a share-rigging scandal in 1990. Ronson was released from prison to a sumptuous “Welcome Home” party provided by the ever-forgiving Jewish community. It was presided over by the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and there too, ingratiating as ever, was Greville Janner.

Since then Ronson has wormed his way back to respectability of sorts with his chairmanship of the sinister Jewish security organisation, the CST, which is largely an offshoot of the Board of Jewish Deputies.

Janner’s energetic lobbying helped ensure that Ronson’s criminal record did not stop him being made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2012 for his services to Jewish — and other — charities.

Another of Janner’s close associates was Stuart Kuttner, a managing editor of the News of the World newspaper when bogus exposes of non-existent racist and neo-nazi plots was something of a staple at the paper. (A former News of the World journalist hack has written about this practice at length).

Other close associates have included the notorious fraudster Robert Maxwell (“Robert Maxwell, aka the Bouncing Czech, demonstrated that you can have a lot of fun in publishing … especially if you are using other people’s money and are not inhibited by ethics or concern about legality”) and Lord Goodman who was a solicitor for former British prime minister Harold Wilson and is said to have prevented many a scandal by threatening newspaper editors.

Janner was also close to other Jewish politicians such as Mrs Thatcher’s former Home Secretary Leon Brittan, now deceased, who has been much in the news of late for his alleged involvement with a paedophile ring.

But it is Janner’s role in the establishment of Britain’s most moneyspinning holocaust charity that is his crowning glory. The Holocaust Education Trust has been rather silent about the debt they owe to Greville Janner, since it became public knowledge that he was a suspected child rapist. As I noted in an earlier article,

This huge organisation has embarked on one of the largest programmes of social engineering ever seen in Britain. Its main achievement has been in making Holocaust propaganda a central part of the core National Curriculum in England. Now every pupil between 11 and 14 must undergo mandatory Holocaust instruction.   More than half of Britain’s schools now take part in the HET’s “Lessons from Auschwitz” programme while it has sent about 15,000 pupils to visit Auschwitz itself.

It directs an ambitious “Outreach” indoctrination programme and claims to have recruited 20,000 “Ambassadors” amongst Britain’s young people to spread the word and diligently ensure that Holocaust enthusiasm does not drop to unacceptable levels.

The HET has impeccable cross-party political and business Jewish connections, including House of Commons Speaker John Bercow and Lord Browne, formerly the head of British Petroleum.  But getting the Prime Minister to attend its annual appeal dinner and announce not only the latest cash boost [from the government to the tune of £2,400,000 per year] but that he would chair the new Holocaust Commission and visit Auschwitz himself next year, was a real coup.

Nevertheless they could never have cornered such a huge share of the Holocaust market without his connections, access to money or driving ambition. It is the achievement of which he is the most proud.

When not networking, Janner’s main joy in life seemed to be to go on international junkets in which he would never miss an opportunity to oil himself up to local dignitaries.

Jewish causes were always what was closest to his heart, whether it was recovering looted wartime art or arranging for the Jews to leave the Eastern Europe for Israel during the Cold war.

Janner’s love for his people has always helped him overcome his infirmities. Two years ago and four years after his diagnosis of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, he was fit enough to travel to Israel to receive his ultimate accolade from his people — the opening of a kindergarten named after him, in  a ceremony attended by the British Ambassador, in Israel.

The naming of the Lord Greville Janner Education Centre in Galilee was a thank you for both his lifelong interest in the welfare of children and commitment to Israel and the Jewish people.

As an indication of how great the public outcry is, eleven leading MPs from seven parties — at least two of them Jewish — have written to The Times asking that the Director of Public Prosecutions reconsider her decision not to prosecute him. They say she risks “damaging public confidence” with her position that the case not go any further.

Life has been good to Greville Janner, due in no small part to his ability for friendship and ethnic fealty. These are gifts, however, that finally seem to be deserting him.

See also Francis Carr Begbie’s “The Silence of Greville Janner”