These claims about the 2019 Labour conference are incorrect
23rd Jan 2020
Claim
At the 2019 Labour conference, the union flag was banned.
Conclusion
There is no evidence this happened.
At the 2019 Labour conference, Palestinian flags filled the hall.
This happened at the 2018 conference.
At the 2019 Labour conference, working class white members were charged more to attend than ethnic minorities.
There was a planned discount for ethnic minority members for a 2018 regional party conference. These plans were scrapped after the UK’s equalities watchdog intervened.
Claim 1 of 3
A post has been shared on Facebook which has three claims relating to the Labour conference in 2019. It claims that British union flags were banned, Palestinian flags filled the conference hall and that working class white people were charged more to attend than non-white people.
There is no evidence that the union flag was banned from the Labour conference in 2019. The picture of Palestinian flags being waved (which features in the post) are from the 2018 Labour conference. We wrote about this last year.
Labour did at one point offer a £10 discount for black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) members to attend a regional conference in the East Midlands in 2018. However, these plans were scrapped, allegedly because Labour had been reported to the Equality and Human Rights Commission on grounds of discrimination. The EHRC told us it didn’t ultimately take any action as the policy had apparently been reversed.
There’s no evidence that this happened for the party’s 2019 national conference.
This article is part of our work factchecking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because there is no evidence to show that these claims happened at the 2019 Labour conference.
