No sooner had
I predicted that the zionists wold use the original FUCU judges absenting themselves from the costs decision as an excuse to make out that the whole FUCU judgment was wrong, we see two examples of zionists doing just that.
Now, to be honest, Dr David Hirsh of the zionist
Engage website gave me the tip-off in
this post. He started factually enough:
Fraser’s lawyers argued that the tribunal should recuse itself from
hearing the case relating to costs because the tribunal had already
expressed a clear opinion in its judgment not only on the substantive
issue of harassment, but also on the issue of costs; for this reason, it
had prejudiced its ability to be seen to be impartial in the hearing
over costs....
The tribunal decided to recuse itself in this case. The judge said that
he did not accept that their judgment had already articulated a view on
the question of costs, but he admitted that a reasonable outside
observer may come to the conclusion that it had.
So, it's all about costs and whether or not the Tribunal had made it known where it stood on the ussue.
Now Hirsh gets a bit slippery:
In this sense at least, the tribunal admitted that it had over-reached itself in its substantive judgment.
If UCU continues its bid to punish Ronnie Fraser, its case for costs
may now be heard by a fresh tribunal. However, it is not clear what
evidence the UCU can adduce to show that Fraser’s claim was vexatious,
since the evidence upon which it is relying is the relevant section from
the judgment in which the tribunal appeared to prejudice the hearing on costs.
Now let's look at the
parts of the judgment where the costs award against Fraser (and co) might be applicable:
177
The result is that the proceedings are dismissed in their totality. The
Claimant has put before us one claim which, on initial examination,
appeared arguable on its merits. Closer scrutiny, however, showed it to
be clearly unsustainable. And, being hopelessly out of time, it is
outside our jurisdiction in any event. The other nine claims are wholly
unfounded and many are also defeated by the jurisdic tional time bar.
Now the Tribunal did agree to the hearing so that could be a point in Fraser's favour but then again on hearing the case it found one of its ten claims was out of time and out of its jurisdiction and the other nine are "wholly unfounded".
Now the bits that could be said to touch on costs:
180
What makes this litigation doubly regrettable is its gargantuan scale.
Given the case management history, the preparations of the parties and
the sensitivity of the subject-matter, we thought (rightly or wrongly)
that it was proper to permit the evidence to take the course mapped out
for it, provided that the hearing did not overrun its allocation. But we
reminded ourselves frequently that, despite appearances, we were not
conducting a public inquiry into anti-Semitism but considering a legal
claim for unlawful harassment. Viewed in that way, a hearing with a host
of witnesses, a 20-day allocation and a trial bundle of 23 volumes can
only be seen as manifestly excessive and disproportionate. The
Employment Tribunals are a hard-pressed public service and it is not
right that their limited resources should be squandered as they have
been in this case. Nor, if (contrary to our view) it was proper to face
them with any claim at all, should the Respondents have been put to the
trouble and expense of defending proceedings of this order or any thing
like it.
Now they seem to be complaining more about the cost to the Tribunal than to the UCU but there is a little word of sympathy for the union having to go to the "trouble and expense of defending proceedings".
Now, it could be that whoever hears the costs issue will not want to dissuade future complainants from er, complaining but clearly the only issue the original Tribunal can be challenged on and is being challenged on is the word or two it uttered touching on costs.
And yet here's Sarah Annes Brown of Harry's Place (who sensibly remove their wacky comments after a week):
SarahAB Mod Discredited Andrew
I have no confidence in their findings. This is not because they ruled against Ronnie but because of the way they did so.
I won't replicate the whole thread here but here's Discredited Andrew helping you guess what other comments looked like:
Discredited Andrew SarahAB
Are you really going to clutch at that straw?
Another
of the findings was that the claim that Jews were booed and jeered at
in conferences was false. They spent a whole day listening to recordings
of conference debates. You're into some weird conspiratorial territory
if you are going to deny that any dishonest accusations were made.
Well now the
Jewish Chronicle have put a marker down on the Recuse Excuse
. Here's the JC's Simon Rocker from this morning's print edition (also on line, see link):
A battle over the legal costs relating to a defeated claim of
antisemitic harassment is set to continue after a tribunal withdrew from
deciding the issue.
The University College Union is trying to recover costs — understood
to be around £600,000 — following the action brought against it by the
director of the Academic Friends of Israel, Ronnie Fraser, who said its
policy on Israel amounted to harassment.
The same tribunal, headed by Judge Anthony Snelson, which had
rejected Mr Fraser’s claim in April was due to hear the case for costs.
But lawyers for Mr Fraser and for the solicitors who represented him
in the harassment case, Mishcon de Reya, argued that the tribunal had
been so scathing in their original ruling that they could not fairly
settle the question.
The tribunal had dismissed Mr Fraser’s claim as “a sorry saga” and
“an impermissible attempt to achieve a political end by litigious
means”.
The UCU will now have to go to a new tribunal. Judge Snelson said:
“We must recuse ourselves and a cost application should be listed before
another tribunal.”
I think Simon Rocker must be deliberately missing the point here. It wasn't the scathing nature of the FUCU judgment that was problematic for a costs hearing but the fact that the judgment could be perceived as having touched on costs. Rocker doesn't even mention that.
So the FUCUps are using the Recuse Excuse. Remember you heard it here first.
As for anti-Semitism, I have been personally accused of that by an AWL member; not, as might be expected, by an inexperienced young cadre over-enthusiastically projecting the party line in an exaggerated, ill-learnt manner, but by the ganzer-macher himself, Sean Matgamna. Why? Because I feel that the best solution to the Israel/Palestine crisis is a single state in which all the inhabitants have full and equal rights, that one can be ethnically and/or religiously a Jew, a Christian or Muslim or Arab, or whatever. This, he mumbled to me in his inimitable manner, was ‘an anti-Semitic position’.
This — a call for racial and religious equality and genuine democracy — might be considered a little unlikely to occur in the near future (but then so is socialism, and the AWL doesn’t stop promoting it on those grounds), but only by the most abstruse logic — or the most tortuous form of ‘dialectics’ — could it be considered as based upon racial discrimination, particularly as it is predicated upon the demand for national/ethnical equality between Arabs and Jews. Moreover, this casual throwing around of accusations of anti-Semitism — that is, hatred of Jews — in response to a political position such as this makes it less easy to combat real anti-Semitism whenever it raises its head, as it trivialises a very serious question.
As for the AWL’s presence in the labour movement, it has broadly speaking been the most positive aspect of its activities over the years. It was its trade-union work which attracted me to the group 35 years back; other aspects, in particular its attitude towards the Labour Party, put me off it. It is in respect of other issues, less directly connected to the working class, where the less positive aspects of its politics are evident.