Jewish Voice For Labour (JVL) is facing financial collapse after it settled out of court in a libel battle against former BBC Panorama journalist John Ware.
The hard-left pressure group has been desperately fundraising after having to pay damages and costs believed to amount to around £200,000.
It comes just months after one of its key supporters, Pink Floyd guitarist Roger Waters, boasted: “We're gonna fight this thing together and we will not lie down.”
JVL co-founder Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and website editor Richard Kuper agreed make a public apology to Mr Ware following defamatory statements made on the Jeremy Vine Show and in a Facebook post in July 2019.
The group wrote in a statement: "Mediation in the case brought by John Ware against Jewish Voice for Labour and two of its officers has now occurred and we can announce that terms of settlement have been agreed, including an apology from Naomi Wimborne Idrissi and JVL for defamatory statements made on the Jeremy Vine Show and included in a Facebook post which we reproduced on our website on 15 July 2019.
“Once a statement of apology has been read out in open court it will be put up on our website.”
naomi
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi
JVL lamented in a Facebook post that the settlement had come at "considerable financial cost".
It has appealed for £200,000 on the CrowdJustice website.
In its plea for donations, the group added: "We now need your help more than ever if JVL is to survive and continue doing the work which is so much valued within our movement.”
JVL has an anonymous donor who is matching donations of up to £50,000.
JVL's desperate appeal for financial help was launched on Thursday, just four minutes after the announcement of Queen Elizabeth II's death at 6.31pm.
JVL told the JC that the timing "was an internal decision which had nothing to do with any external event”.
In a statement, JVL said: "As part of the settlement reached, neither side is at liberty to comment on the terms of the agreement.”
John Ware also said that the terms of the settlement did not permit him to disclose the details, including the amount awarded.
In a statement, Mr Ware said: "I'm very pleased that JVL finally agreed to apologise for their demonstrably false accusations.
“This will be the second of two full apologies to be made in open court, arising from a slew of defamatory accusations following the Panorama programme about antisemitism in Labour under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.”
He added: "I accept criticism, but not blatant lies about me and my professional integrity.”
Mr Ware claimed that JVL defamed his reputation as a professional journalist over the BBC Panorama programme that investigated antisemitism within Labour under Jeremy Corbyn.
The day after transmission in July 2019, JVL’s media officer Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi had told the Jeremy Vine show’s 1.4 million listeners on BBC Radio 2 that Mr Ware had "a terrible record of Islamophobia, far right politics, he’s been disciplined at… BBC has had to apologise.”
Ms Wimborne-Idrissi added on Facebook that Mr Ware was a journalist with a “record of right wing, racist work”.
That post was reproduced on JVL's website, run by the editor Richard Kuper, founder of Pluto Press, the radical left publisher, once the publishing arm of the International Socialists, today known as the Socialist Workers Party.
JVL and Ms Wimborne-Idrissi had the support of Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, who said in March 2021: "Naomi Wimborne Idrissi, I’m with you. We’re gonna fight this thing together, and we will not lie down in front of absurd accusations against Labour Party members of many many years standing who’ve done nothing in their lives except support the values that the Labour Party should be about.”
In July 2021, he added: "Enough is enough, Keir Starmer and John Ware, the appalling director of that dreadful program that BBC Panorama brought out about antisemitism in the Labour Party which was a total misnomer. But – more of that later in the courts.”
Mr Waters did not respond to a request for comment.
JVL had initially argued that the comments were “honest opinion”. However, Mrs Justice Steyn ruled that reasonable listeners would have understood they were assertions of fact, which meant they switched to the “privileged right of reply to attack” defence.
But earlier this summer, JVL said that they wanted to explore a settlement through mediation.
Mr Ware had previously said that he has never been disciplined for anything by the BBC, is not an Islamophobe and has never engaged in “far right politics”.
He has already been successful in a case against the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn in respect of false allegations that he had “deliberately” set out to “mislead the public" with the program on antisemitism, that he “knowingly promoted falsehoods" and “fabricated facts”.
He is also in the midst of a lawsuit against Paddy French, editor of the Press Gang blog, over Mr French’s claims that the Panorama documentary “bent the truth to breaking point” and that he was a “rogue reporter". The case continues.
