2 to 98!  (1995)

In 1995 Margaret Hodge lost a debate to Jeremy Corbyn. She received 2 votes. He received 98. That is the grudge we see today, as she continues to scream obscenities at Jeremy Corbyn through the decades. “You’re a fucking antisemite and a racist!” screamed Margaret Hodge.

“Since 1995 Margaret Hodge has been known by her title “Fuming Maniac”. Her vicious hatred of Jeremy Corbyn is understandable, losing the 1995 vote, she received 2%, he received 98%. Her love of using the Holocaust when lying has not received any better reception this time. But at least, unlike Ken Livingstone, she has no historical facts to back up her insistence that Labour members should be allowed to compare things with the Nazis. Pity no one recorded her calling him a “fucking Nazi” in 1995. Some used to say that was myth. Now no one does…”

‘Fuming maniac’ Margaret Hodge once branded an entire audience ‘stupid’ after Corbyn beat her in a debate / William J Richardson 

“You’re a fucking antisemite and a racist!” – these are the words screamed by Dame Margaret Hodge into the face of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.    —  William J Richardson

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Fresh call to resign over smear

Sadly when Margaret Hodge played her part in destroying the lives of so many Islington children she largely got away with it, only one sued her. Demetrius Panton was awarded £30,000 in damages and financial settlement. The others were forgotten. Her attacks on social workers such as Liz Davies are legendary. It takes bravery to stand up to a multi-millionaire politician known to have no ethical compass.


“She was guilty of rather more than a casual failure of oversight. She dismissed the detailed, accurate reporting of the London Evening Standard – whose editor, Stewart Steven, battled with typical ferocity to hold her to account – as “a sensationalist piece of gutter journalism”. Not content with shutting her eyes to his front pages, our latter-day champion of the whistleblower closed her ears to the courageous whistle-blowing of a social worker, Liz Davies. In an open letter to the BBC after it investigated a range of monstrous abuse (child prostitution, torture, alleged murders), Hodge libelled one of its victims as “seriously disturbed”. Years later, in 2003, she was forced to pay Demetrius Panton £10,000 in damages for that, though understandably he was not assuaged by her apology. In a prescient echo of her words to Fairhead on Monday, he called on Hodge to resign. By then, her friend and neighbour Mr Tony Blair had seen fit to promote her to – what else? – minister for children.”


“Sexual Abuse in Irene Watson Area: David Cofie raised the issue of sexual abuse among eight- to 16-year-old children at the Neighbourhood Forum. He is clearly concerned about the matter. However, simply requesting more resources is not, in my view, responsible for a manager given the well known concern of members at the state of the Social Services budget. I expect more appropriate responses from people in management positions in Social Services. The obvious option for your management to consider in relation to this emerging problem in the area is to reduce the fieldwork staffing to release resources for a detached youth worker in the area. I await your response.”  —  Margaret Hodge

“Margaret Hodge has devoted much time to harming social workers trying to deal with sexual abuse. Many feel she should be in prison. Bear in mind this was in Islington, so her hatred of Jeremy Corbyn will be because he opposes sexual abuse of children and knows Islington better than most, it will not just be the later 2 to 98 debate. A formal apology to Demetrios Panton was made in the High Court on 19 November 2003 by Hodge’s barrister together with a financial settlement of £30,000. None of her other victims have had any justice, few victims of sexual abuse will pursue things through the courts, Hodge was said to be very surprised Demetrios Panton did. She did not break him as hard as she thought. Be careful Jeremy. Her 2018 foul mouthed abuse and ultra-extreme racism at least means people are again remembering her actions.”

“Immediately after Tony Blair appointed Margaret Hodge as the new Minister for Children in his recent reshuffle, phones started ringing among former social workers who had once worked under her. “It’s like putting the fox in charge of the chickens,” one commented in disgust. “A sick joke,” remarked another. These social workers couldn’t help recalling the inside story of an appalling child sex abuse scandal many of us have forgotten. In 1990, when Mrs Hodge – then Mr Blair’s neighbour in Richmond Crescent, Islington – was the leader of Islington council, these senior social workers had reported to her that a paedophile ring was operating in the borough and that children were being sexually abused in Islington care homes. Mrs Hodge’s response was revealing: she chose not to back a thorough investigation. Instead, she dismissed their concerns and accused these social workers of being ” obsessional”. When the story was exposed in the Evening Standard two and a half years later, in October 1992, her re-sponse was equally aggressive. She accused the newspaper of “a sensationalist piece of gutter journalism”. It would be a further two-and-a-half years and five independent reports later before she would half-heartedly admit that she was wrong. Yet she would have known as early as 1991 that paedophiles were preying on children in Islington’s care.”  (28 April 2013)

“Islington Council dismissed calls for Joe Caluori, who is married to Mrs Hodge’s daughter, to step aside from his post while its investigation is ongoing. The council insisted there was no conflict of interest…”  — The Needle  (7 April 2014)

“Jimmy Savile sexually assaulted vulnerable children in a care home in Islington. It is the first time Savile has been connected with the abuse in Islington in the Seventies and early Eighties that has resulted in the council paying hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation to victims. It is thought dozens of vulnerable children were abused by a number of paedophiles. However, most of the abusers escaped justice because allegations made at the time by victims were ignored and many files, which contained corroborating evidence, have been lost or shredded. Mrs Hodge was a councillor from 1973 and leader of the council for a decade from 1982.The Department for Education has announced that Islington should now examine claims that Savile abused children from one of its homes for itself.”  —   & Eileen Fairweather  (The Telegraph, 6 April 2014)

BBC Gagged?   —  Evening Standard (11 November 2003)

Liz Davies on Margaret Hodge The World Tonight 2003 (7 August 2014)

Channel 4 News 1995 (22 February 2013)

BBC News 1995 (22 February 2013) Watch a 1992 clip of Margaret Hodge viciously and dishonestly attacking those exposing her! Her daughter was not yet the editor of BBC News.

BBC London interview with Margaret Hodge, 2003 (Islington Children’s Homes) (22 February 2013)  Call for resignation of child sex abuse Minister.

ITV News on Margaret Hodge (Islington Children’s Homes) ( 23 February 2013)

Liz Davies on Newsnight 2003 (28 February 2010)

Margaret Hodge & Tony Blair (7 August 2016)

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Labour’s Margaret Hodge accused of hypocrisy over tax affairs

“A prominent Labour politician and a fierce critic of tax avoidance has been accused of hypocrisy after receiving shares in a family company from a foundation based in a tax haven. Margaret Hodge, former head of Britain’s parliamentary public accounts committee, was among the beneficiaries in 2011 of the winding-up of a Liechtenstein foundation that held shares in Stemcor, the private steel-trading business set up by Hans Oppenheimer, her father. The shares were brought onshore using a scheme, known as the Liechtenstein Disclosure Facility, that offered reduced penalties and no risk of prosecution for Britons moving undeclared assets back to the UK.”  —  , & (Financial Times 29 April 2015)

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Margaret Hodge ignores IHRA definition and makes racist statement

“And so we come to Margaret Hodge. A pampered, privileged MP who’s never known war. She labels people antisemites for seeing echoes of Nazi germany in Palestine: A people trapped in a ghetto because their very existence is deemed a threat to the state. But now, she tells us that being told off at work for screaming at her boss made her feel THE SAME WAY as relatives fleeing Nazi Germany. I’ve been told off at work. It wasn’t very nice. But it was a million miles from the terror of a one tonne bomb going off and feeling the shockwave shatter through your chest. And if it’s not as bad as that, it sure as hell isn’t as bad as being hunted like an animal, for slaughter by a racist state. Margaret Hodge should (but won’t be) ashamed of herself. And so should her Centrist chums…”  —   (17 August 2018)

Norman Finkelstein on Margaret Hodge… (August 2018)

Aaron Bastani on Margaret Hodge (17 August 2018)

“Dame Margaret Hodge has said facing investigation for confronting Jeremy Corbyn over antisemitism made her think about “what it felt like to be a Jew in Germany in the 30s”. The veteran Jewish MP, who lost family members in the Holocaust, faced disciplinary action for calling the Labour leader an antisemite to his face.  In an interview with Sky News she said: “It felt almost as if they were coming for me. it’s rather difficult to define but there’s that fear and it reminded me of what my dad used to say. He always said to me as a child: ‘You’ve got to keep a packed suitcase at the door Margaret, in case you ever have got to leave in a hurry’.” Dame Margaret was speaking for the first time since the party dropped its investigation into her… “When I heard about the disciplinary, my emotional response resonated with that feeling of fear, that clearly was at the heart of what my father felt when he came to Britain.”  But a Labour spokesperson said Dame Margaret’s feelings were “extreme and disconnected from reality.” The spokesperson accused her of diminishing “the seriousness of the issue”. Dame Margret said she felt bullied by the actions the party tried to take against her.  Despite being a secular Jew she said it was her religious background that “defines me”.  Speaking about antisemitism in the Labour Party, she said she had “never seen it like this, I think it’s a bit scary. We’ve got the growth of populism, whether it’s Trump, whether it’s Boris Johnson, and now whether it’s the cult of Corbynism which allows these attitudes to emerge. That’s what scares me. I wasn’t alive in the 1930s… but it sort of makes you feel that if you don’t stand up against it then what are you allowing to occur?

A spokesperson for Labour said: “Jeremy is determined to tackle antisemitism in the Labour Party, so Jewish people feel it is a warm and welcoming home.  “The comparison of the Labour Party’s disciplinary process with Nazi Germany is so extreme and disconnected from reality, it diminishes the seriousness of the issue of antisemitism. We all need to work together to build support and confidence in the Labour Party among Jewish communities in Britain.”   —   Daniel Sugarman (18 July 2018)

Margaret Hodge received a written reprimand, but will not be expelled from the party for this incident.

#HodgeComparisons went viral, not in the best of taste, but satire and mockery are an English tradition as a reaction to vile and offensive views, crying wolf is unwise, dangerous and transparent.  Inevitably it is mocked. Those who find the satire offensive feed it.  Anyone without an axe to grind sees through Margaret Hodge.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf is one of Aesop’s Fables which is reflected in the English idiom to cry wolf, defined as to give a false alarm, meaning to make false claims, with the result that subsequent true claims are disbelieved.  The tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking wolves are attacking his flock. When a wolf actually does appear and the boy again calls for help, the villagers believe that it is another false alarm and the sheep are eaten by the wolf. In later English-language poetic versions of the fable, the wolf also eats the boy.  The moral stated at the end of the Greek version is, “this shows how liars are rewarded: even if they tell the truth, no one believes them”. It echoes a statement attributed to Aristotle by Diogenes Laërtius in his The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, in which the sage was asked what those who tell lies gain by it and he answered “that when they speak truth they are not believed”. William Caxton similarly closes his version with the remark that “men bileve not lyghtly hym whiche is knowen for a lyer” As Samuel Croxall wrote, “when we are alarmed with imaginary dangers in respect of the public, till the cry grows quite stale and threadbare, how can it be expected we should know when to guard ourselves against real ones?”

BBC News

“So who didn’t sign the BBC staffers’ petition for Greg Dyke? Refuseniks included Margaret Hodge’s daughter Lizzie Watson, producer for the BBC’s political editor Andrew Marr – making for divided loyalties over Hutton.”  Evening Standard (13 February 2004)

Now Deputy Editor, BBC News at 6 and 10.

Is it relevant that the most anti-Corbyn news on the BBC is done by the daughter of the most anti-Corbyn MP in the UK?  How large is her inheritance to be?

“BBC’s Lizzi Watson is now Deputy Editor for BBC News at six and ten. She was previously Head of News, BBC Asian Network and Executive Producer, BBC Newsnight. She tweets @islingtonlizzi.”  “Lizzie Watson, a senior BBC news editor, is Margaret Hodge’s daughter.” “Margaret Hodge’s daughter – Lizzie Watson (daughter of first husband Andrew Watson) does indeed work for the BBC”  “There is no problem with Hodge’s daughter being an editor at BBC news whilst they attack Corbyn. She’s doing a great job.”  “In addition to being universally condemned by Jews and non-Jews alike for comparing the Labour Party under Corbyn to Germany under Hitler, many were swift to point out that under the very definition of anti-Semitism, which Hodge is calling on the Labour Party to endorse in full, she would have been kicked out of the party for belittling the genocide of five million Jews by comparing it to her treatment.” —  (23 August 2018)

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“If Hodge and her sisters in struggle, Smeeth and Berger, were not craven opportunists and selective anti-racists and defenders of human rights, they might have been speaking out more, or even at all, about the disgusting and openly racist nation state bill that the Israeli government has just approved while Benjamin Netanyahu was simultaneously hosting a visit from the Hungarian PM Victor Orban — a political leader who is pushing anti-semitic, anti-Roma and Islamophobic themes at every opportunity.”  —  David Rosenberg (26 July 2018

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Len McCluskey (September 2018)

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War profiteer

“In other news, if Corbyn or a like-minded colleague of his is Labour’s leader when the party wins an election then the party’s plans for tackling tax avoidance will have a significant effect on the behaviour of companies like, for example, Stemcor that pays tax equal to 0.01% of its profits.  Stemcor is registered on the notorious tax-dodging island of Jersey.  Coincidently, Margaret Hodge has over a million pounds worth of shares in Stemcor, which was founded by her father and is run by her brother, shares that routinely pay “dividends” of over £50,000 per annum to her.”   —   (17 July 2018)

“Analysis of Stemcor’s latest accounts show that the business paid tax of just £163,000 on revenues of more than £2.1bn in 2011. However. it is not known whether the company – which made profits of £65m – used similar controversial tax avoidance measures criticised in the past by Mrs Hodge.  Stemcor’s tax bill to the exchequer equates to just 0.01pc of the revenues it booked through its UK-based business. In accounts filed with Companies House, Stemcor revealed that despite generating about one third of its revenues in Britain, its UK tax contribution made up only 2.7pc of the tax the company paid globally…  Today, the business claims to be the sixth largest private UK company by turnover. Last year the company, which employs 2,000 people in 45 countries, generated sales of £6bn from trading about 20m tonnes of steel.”   —  & Harry Wilson (The Telegraph, 9 November 2012)

Selling a lot of military grade steel for military projects it might seem relevant what Margaret Hodge’s voting record for war is like?  We know Tony Blair got her out of a lot of scrapes in return for her support in his war crimes.  We know Jeremy Corbyn’s work for peace disgusts her deeply and profoundly, as does his voting record opposing wars and preferring diplomacy:
War profiteering is said to be the reason the family and the company have been so secretive and so little is known. Jewish businessmen, who became rich living in neutral Egypt profitting from the war, was not a good look after the Second World War.  Especially if war profits were to be a major factor in future work as well. More recently the GMB Union has criticised the building of British ships with non-British steel. Stemcor, Steel Marketing Corporation the world’s largest independent steel trading business, arranges this.

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The Margaret Hodge Song


What is known as the The Margaret Hodge song in Parliament.

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“You’re a fucking antisemite and a racist!” screamed Margaret Hodge 

As well as being known as Fuming Maniac for her foul mouthed swearing and blaspheming Marg has also been nicknamed Jezebel. “Jezebel persecuted others, and fabricated evidence. For these transgressions against the God and people of Israel, Jezebel met a gruesome death—thrown out of a window by members of her own court retinue, and the flesh of her corpse eaten by stray dogs. “

A Christian Zionist gave this Biblical passage in response to Margaret Hodge‘s hatred:  “I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.” — Revelation‬ ‭2:9‬



Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul”

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