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CHRIS WILLIAMSON called on BBC journalist Nick Robinson to apologise to him today after the broadcaster upheld a complaint over misrepresentation.
The former Derby North MP had claimed during an interview with the Today programme presenter to have never seen anti-semitism in the Labour Party.
After the interview, Mr Robinson tweeted: “Did you forget you’d agreed to screen a film in Parliament by a woman suspended from Labour for saying the Jews controlled the slave trade?”
A reader of the tweet complained to the BBC that this was inaccurate, in that the woman in question — Jackie Walker — had been the subject, not the maker, of the film, and that the phrase “the Jews controlled the slave trade” misrepresented what she said.
BBC Complaints said on Tuesday that Mr Robinson’s paraphrasing of Ms Walker’s on-film speech gave an “insufficiently accurate impression” of her words.
Mr Williamson said: “I hope Nick Robinson will now issue an apology to me. Mr Robinson helped to exacerbate the smears against me and others, which ultimately led Labour Party bureaucrats to act unlawfully by suspending my membership of the party after almost 44 years of dedicated activism.”
In response to the BBC, Mr Robinson said he accepted the finding.
