MET Police chief Cressida Dick said yesterday that her officers were assessing online material and allegations of anti-Semitic hate crimes within the Labour Party.
Dick who gave the order to shoot to kill the entirely innocent Jean Charles de Menezes, on the grounds that he was a terrorist, said it appears ‘there may have been a crime committed’.
Her move comes after LBC Radio obtained what it said was an internal Labour document detailing 45 cases, involving messages posted by members on social media. Dick said the Met had a duty to assess the material and not dismiss it.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that her officers were seeking advice from the Crown Prosecution Service. But she insisted the Met was ‘not investigating’ the Labour Party itself. LBC handed the dossier to Dick in an interview in September.
It had previously passed the material to ex-police officer Mak Chishty, who said that 17 instances should have been reported to the police for investigation, and another four were potential race hate crimes.
Dick said she hoped to be able to conduct the investigations quickly. She added: ‘We would always want institutions and political parties and similar to be able to regulate themselves. However, if somebody passes us material which they say amounts to a crime we have a duty to look at that and not just dismiss it.
‘We have been assessing some material that was passed to me, in a radio studio of all things, about two months ago and we are now investigating some of that material because it appears there may have been crime committed.’
The Tory Party has been conducting a campaign for a number of months that the Labour Party is anti-semitic. The police have now apparently taken over the campaign, using material that it says has been in its possession for some time. It is understood Labour has not been contacted by the police and has not been told of the exact nature of the allegations being investigated.
