Jane Ashworth

Jane Ashworth is the Advisory Editor of Democratiya and the Project Director of Engage, which, according to her personal profile, is a "campaign against left anti-semitism". She has served on the Executive of Socialist Organiser, the forerunner to Alliance for Workers Liberty ("a Trostskyist groupuscule") for nearly a decade. Furthermore, she is the founding Chair of Labour Friends of Iraq, co-author of the Euston Manifesto, and principal organizer of the Unite Against Terror website.

Activities

The following comment on Ashworth and the Euston Manifesto is from the Workers' Liberty website:

Some of the writers of the Euston Manifesto, notably Alan Johnson and Jane Ashworth, learned their opposition to "reactionary anti-imperialism" from us. That was many years ago. It is as long ago as 1994 that Alan Johnson quit the AWL (to join the SWP, and he has oscillated frequently since then!), and much longer ago that Jane Ashworth and others left us to join the tame-Labourite remnants of the Independent Labour Party.
But they turned against us in a big way, with heat and vehemence, more recently, in 2004, when they denounced us for not giving critical support to the US/UK occupation of Iraq. They refused to collaborate with us on building towards the launch of Iraq Union Solidarity, and instead launched their own Labour-leadership-loyal outfit, Labour Friends of Iraq, oriented towards the most "moderate" wing of the labour movement in Iraq (IFTU) to the exclusion of other wings (FWCUI, UUI, IFOU).
They exulted that they were now in the big time. Why, New Labour had cited Labour Friends of Iraq as its "website of the week"!

Current

1. Monitoring Respect (George Galloway's party), and running RespectWatch
2. Editor of the Engage website

2006

1. Chair of a panel at Bar-Ilan Univ.'s Conference on "Academic Freedom and the Politics of Boycotts", International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom (IAB), Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel, Jan. 25-26, 2006. Ashworth chaired a panel entitled "The ideological foundations of the boycott campaign against Israel".
2. Discussant in panel entitled "Anti-semitism and the left: The acceptable prejudice?"
3. Commentator in David Aaronovitch's "Don't Get me started" program for Channel 5 (26 Sept 2006)
4. Panelist at the Progress Labour Party Conference Event: "Anti-Semitism and the left: What is to be done?" (24 Sept. 2006)

2005

1. Registered domain: unite-against-terror.com [2]. She is the instigator of this project.
2. Attempted to host a debate between Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway in May 2005[3]

Affiliations

• Engage
• Democratiya
• Euston Manifesto
• Unite Against Terror
• Labour Friends of Iraq
• RespectWatch principal contributor
• StreetGames Charity to bring sports to inner cities
• Hak Mao blog -- regular contributor

Publications

• Jane Ashworth with David Hirsh, The state they’re in, Progress Magazine (Labour Party), Dec 2005.
• Jane Ashworth, New introduction to the republished That's Funny You Don't Look Anti-Semitic by Steve Cohen. It was originally published in 1984, and Engage republished it in 2005.