Margaret Hodge

Dame Margaret Hodge (2017)

Dame Margaret Eve Hodge, Lady Hodge, DBE (née Oppenheimer, formerly Watson; born 8 September 1944) is a British politician serving as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Barking since a by-election in 1994. A member of the Labour Party, she previously served as Leader of Islington Borough Council, London from 1982 to 1992. She has held a number of ministerial roles and served as Chair of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee from 2010 to 2015.

Hodge is the daughter of the co-founder of steel firm Stemcor and remains a major shareholder. She was a councillor on Islington Council from 1973 to 1994, was chair of the Housing Committee, and then Council Leader from 1982 to 1992. Hodge later apologised for failing to ensure that allegations of serious child abuse in council-run homes were sufficiently investigated and for libelling a complainant.

Hodge was appointed Junior Minister for Disabled People in 1998 and promoted to Minister for Universities in 2001, subsequently becoming the first Children's Minister in 2003, joining the Privy Council. In 2005, Hodge became Minister of State for Work. Hodge served as Minister of State for Culture and Tourism from 2007 to 2008 and 2009 until Labour was defeated at the 2010 general election. Remaining a backbencher since then, Hodge has announced that she will not seek re-election to the House of Commons at the next general election.

Quotes

2006–2019

• They can't get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry [...] When I knock on doors I say to people, 'are you tempted to vote BNP?' and many, many, many - eight out of 10 of the white families - say 'yes'. That's something we have never seen before, in all my years. Even when people voted BNP, they used to be ashamed to vote BNP. Now they are not.
• What has happened in Barking and Dagenham is the most rapid transformation of a community we have ever witnessed.
  Nowhere else has changed so fast. When I arrived in 1994, it was a predominantly white, working class area. Now, go through the middle of Barking and you could be in Camden or Brixton. That is the key thing that has created the environment the BNP has sought to exploit. ["Mrs Hodge claimed the anger is not down to racism"] It is a fear of change. It is gobsmacking change.
  • "White voters are deserting us for BNP, says Blair ally", The Telegraph (16 April 2006).
  • The other constituency in the borough is Dagenham and Rainham (or Dagenham before 2010). A report in 2007, commissioned by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, found "no evidence that social housing allocation favours foreign migrants over UK citizens." Coming to the same conclusion in 2014 were the British governments Migration Advisory Committee and, in 2022, Oxford University’s Migration Observatory.

• At this moment of grave danger, we simply cannot allow the party to flounder, become utterly irrelevant to the political debate and disintegrate into a second-rate pressure group. Make no mistake — unless we listen to our voters, our party faces political oblivion.
  • After the no-confidence vote in Corbyn's Labour leadership, as cited in "Inside account of Labour MPs’ attacks on Jeremy Corbyn", Politico (27 June 2016)

• I am a secular, immigrant Jew. I have never been active in the Jewish community; my two marriages were to non-Jews. I have visited Israel a number of times and have been a vocal critic of successive Israeli governments on many counts. But I am a Jew. My grandmother and my uncle were murdered by Hitler and many cousins and other relatives were slaughtered in the gas chambers. Indeed, my grandfather was one of six siblings; we are the only surviving line left and that was because my parents were in Egypt when the war broke out.
  I joined the Labour party to fight racism. In the 1960s the Labour party was the natural home for Jews. To find myself 50 years later, in 2018, confronting antisemitism in my own party is completely and utterly awful.
  • "I was right to confront Jeremy Corbyn over Labour’s antisemitism", The Guardian (18 July 2018)
  • Published following Hodge confronting Corbyn behind the Speaker's Chair in the House of Commons and accusing him being "an anti-Semitic racist". She was alleged to have sworn at him; the precise sequence of words are inconsistent among sources.

2020–2022

• Within the Labour Party, we now have a culture which sadly has become embedded, which was allowed to drift from the fringes of the Labour Party into the heart of the party, which enables people to express anti-Semitism.
  Probably my talking to you this morning will fill my Twitter with abusive tweets which are basically anti-Semitic.
• The terrible truth is that [Mr Corbyn] constantly makes himself the centre of the argument.
  What we need to root out is anti-Semitism, and for as long as he is one of the individuals who refuses to accept the extent of anti-Semitism in the party, who constantly says that people like me have been politically motivated and are attacking him personally instead of attacking the anti-Semitism that he expressly tolerates, and has allowed to spread right through the party - that's really the problem.
  • On the Today programme BBC Radio 4 (19 November 2020), as cited in "MP Dame Margaret Hodge reveals vile anti-Semitic abuse amid Jeremy Corbyn suspension row", Evening Standard (19 November 2020)
  • Following Corbyn's comments on the EHRC report into the Labour Party and the withdrawal of the party whip.

• [T]he government proposes to outsource the registration of companies to the professionals working in this space, like accountants, lawyers and company service providers. While most professionals act with integrity, it is people in these very jobs who have been responsible for creating the web of opaque corporate structures that obscure illicit financial flows. So why does the government refuse to put in place robust systems to regulate, check and discipline the professionals involved so that the few bad apples can be eliminated?
  • "The government has a golden opportunity to show zero tolerance for dirty money – they mustn’t squander it", The Times (13 December 2022)
  • On a bill to deal with Economic Crime which became the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023. The issue of "dirty money" is more formally known as money laundering.

2023–present

• It was only because of his actions and his words that I came to the decision in 2018; this man was an antisemite and a racist.
  • Speaking at the Jewish Labour Movement conference (8 January 2023), as cited in "Momentum founder refuses to apologise for 'hatred' of activists", The Jewish Chronicle (10 January 2023)[
  • Referring to revelations in 2018 concerning Jeremy Corbyn's response to the removal of the mural in Tower Hamlets (in 2012) and the wreath-laying controversy.

• [After the 2019 general election] Had Corbyn won then, I think things would have been different; I couldn't have stayed in the party.
• [Is Labour never having a female leader "shameful"?] Yes. [...] Oh, it’s horrible. There’s still sexism, which is why you can never take your foot off the accelerator.
  • "Margaret Hodge: Confronting anti-Semitism in Labour was harder than fighting the BNP", New Statesman (18 February 2023)

• Kishinev. Babi Yar. Munich. The sites of Jewish massacres throughout history. Now there is another place that will for ever be associated with the slaughter of innocent Jews: Kfar Aza.
  Kibbutz Kfar Aza was home to about 800 people and was established in 1951 by Jewish refugees from Morocco and Egypt (where I was born and from which my family escaped in 1949). Like so many kibbutzim, its founders were idealists, living communally on a model with socialist foundations. Its name – literally meaning "Gaza Village" – reflects its location, just over three miles from the city of Gaza.
• On Saturday, the worst nightmares of the people of Kfar Aza were realised.
  A barrage of rockets sent men, women and children into their safe rooms. Then hundreds of Hamas terrorists breached the security barrier. A group of them, fully armed, went from house to house in Kfar Aza, searching for Jews to slaughter.
  People were burned alive in their homes and cars. Babies and young children were killed and mutilated. Others were dragged into Gaza as hostages.
  These heinous crimes are unspeakable, and yet we must speak them. The world must know what happened to the people of Kfar Aza.
  • "Israel’s response to this terror must be resolute. But it must remain consistent with international law", The Guardian (14 October 2023)
  • From an account of the Kfar Aza massacre perpetuated by Hamas on 7 October 2023, part of the coordinated 2023 attack on Israel which began the 2023 Israel–Hamas war.

• [T]wo of my granddaughters are of secondary school age, so they go to a single-sex girls secondary school. And because it's single-sex, there's a very large Muslim population there. The school originally put up some sort of display where they had an Israeli flag and a Palestinian flag. Good stuff. But the Muslim girls tore down the Israeli flag and replaced it with another Palestinian flag. So, only two Palestinian flags.
  The girls came home — they live next door to me — and they said, "We're not going to tell anybody we're Jewish." So then we had a bit of a discussion about that. They went back the next day and the one who is — she's just 12 — some of these Muslim girls came up to her and said: "Are you Jewish?" So she says, "Yes". So they said, "Which side are you on?" Terrible. So she sort of said, "I’m not on either side," and then they started poking her with a Palestinian flag.
  • "'I Just Couldn’t Take It': How a Jewish Politician Decided to Confront Left-Wing Antisemitism", Politico (5 November 2023)

• We as a nation should understand that how we treat those who escape from persecution and genocide is central to our reputation as a country that boasts a humanitarian approach to genocide and the Holocaust.
• Told by leading Government politicians that they pose an "existential threat" to the West's way of life, that they are part of a "hurricane" of mass migration, that MPs feel "besieged by asylum seekers", and that asylum seekers are "invading" Britain.
  We should reflect on what we say and what we do today before we exercise any moral entitlement to condemn the atrocities of the past.
  The language we use today matters.
  • "MP: Asylum seekers face similar hostile environment to 1940s Jewish refugees", The National (Glasgow, 25 January 2024)
  • Extracts from a speech delivered during the House of Commons annual debate near Holocaust Memorial Day, which in the UK is held on 27 January. Much Of Margaret Hodge's speech was dedicated to the experience of her Jewish grandfather, a 66-year old refugee from Vienna who was interned. She commented: "the German Jews found themselves housed with German Nazis".

See also

• Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party