The Labour Antisemitism Report: Lies Upon Lies
Of all the negative stories spun about the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, its leader from 2015 to early 2020, the notion that the party was ‘institutionally antisemitic’ was likely the most damaging. It was certainly the most concerning. Where failures of communication, perhaps even equivocation and indecision on the key issue of EU membership, were understandable lapses, antisemitism was surely beyond the pale. I trust that I do not need to explain why that is in this piece. One need not even point to the Holocaust to see how antisemitism poisons and destroys free societies. It is not too far to describe Jewish people, as many have, as ‘the canary in the coalmine’ when it comes to the destructive forces of hatred. In this week of Passover, it seems especially worth noting that no one can or should fault those in the Jewish community who were reluctant to wait for the bread to rise before speaking out about the dangers of antisemitism on the left.
The problem was certainly real, then, and serious, too. Even Corbyn himself, by most credible accounts a decent man with a lifelong commitment to fighting injustice, slipped across the line more than once. There was the mural, of course — a clear first-glance case of the leader’s blindness in the face of obvious antisemitic imagery. But let’s not excuse his comments on Hamas and Hezbollah, either. While it’s unlikely that he meant to describe these groups as ‘friends’ in the sense that we’d ordinarily use the word, he certainly seemed to take at face-value their claims to be heroic underdogs resisting Israeli occupation. This links to what I see as a broader failure on Corbyn’s part and on the part of many on the left: a reflexive anti-Americanism that, while rooted in humanistic anti-imperialist beliefs, all too easily leads to support for the other side, no matter how retrogressive or abhorrent that other side may be.
Moreover, it is clearly not enough to point to the faults and failings of other politicians in other parties. We know Boris Johnson to be a lowest common denominator hack, happy to use racist tropes to bolster his image as a bumbling mid-century throwback and play to his base. We know of the UK establishment’s long history of cosying up to brutal dictators* and appalling regimes. We even know that the same Conservative Party that so self-righteously slammed the opposition over antisemitism was at the very same time whipping its MEPs to vote in support of Hungary’s foul, bloated strongman leader Viktor Orbán. While each of these facts can lead us to infer some suitably damning conclusions about the motivations of many who pushed the Labour antisemitism narrative, none of them can excuse or justify left-wing antisemitism. The Labour Party had and has an obligation to get its house in order.
And the party did attempt to do so, though it undoubtedly waited too long and bungled the public relations side of its efforts. When the 2016 report by former Liberty head Shami Chakrabarti failed to prove damning enough, and when that year’s shameful attempt to depose Corbyn less than a year into his term as leader died an embarrassing, ignominious death, the issue continued to bubble over. In March 2019, the independent Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) informed the party that it would be investigating claims of antisemitism. The story broke in the national press in May, and politicians and commentators alike wasted no time amplifying allegations and speculating as to what would be uncovered.
Fast forward a few months to the present day, April 2020. The interim saw the Conservatives inflict a staggering defeat in December’s election, gaining an 80-seat majority, and Keir Starmer, easily the least left-wing candidate in the race, win the party’s leadership. If there was a time to ventilate the party’s darker corners, letting the spring air blow out the dusty remnants of the old leadership, it would seem to be now.
All of which makes the developments of the last day or so deeply surprising. On Easter Sunday (12 April), Sky News reported that the party had produced an 860-page dossier summing up its internal investigation.
It also reported that the results of that investigation would not be passed on to EHRC.
It wasn’t long before sympathetic journalists began tweeting out excerpts from the report. Copies have already shown up on dropboxes all over the internet, and I would be amazed if some major newspaper didn’t soon publish the report in full**. To say that its contents are damning is to severely understate the matter. On page after page, the report details open attempts by party officials to sabotage the leadership. WhatsApp conversations slamming and abusing party members, including the ever resilient Diane Abbott, sit alongside cries of lament as the 2017 general election failed to wipe the party out.
Most striking, though, is the way in which the party right callously manipulated antisemitism to cause maximum damage to the leadership. The moral derangement is, even in the context of the cut-throat world of professional politics, shocking. Bending over backwards to be charitable to these people, it is possible to argue that they genuinely and in good faith believed Jeremy Corbyn as leader to be a severe threat to both the party and the country.
But then we see cases like this, where senior party staffer Emilie Oldknow gloats about obstructing the removal of former London mayor Ken Livingstone ‘in order to embarrass JC’. How can we comprehend the sheer cynicism and maliciousness of such an action? The mind boggles.
Manipulating and weaponising antisemitism in this way is, of course, itself antisemitism. Treating the safety of Jewish people as just another means to stick it to the party left, all while bleating incessantly about the left’s failure to protect Jewish members, is something below ordinary lying and common or garden backstabbing. Give me more time and I could perhaps find the proper vocabulary to articulate my sheer moral outrage at and contempt for these people. For now, I will have to settle for near-speechless rage.
Many others in the party seem to feel the same. Twitter is ablaze with members sharing their stories, their incredulity, their pain. Having run around in the freezing cold and the rain myself, knocking on members’ doors to encourage them to get out and vote Labour in the past election, I can feel some small slice of that pain. It was bad enough to have hope for a better society stripped away as the results came in. To find out that this was exactly what the people running the party I went out of my way to support wanted is to reopen the wound and pour salt in.
We have been lied to. In being dismissed as paranoid for suspecting foul play within the party, we have been gaslit. We will note how the new leadership responds, and we will note all those who were so active in spreading the antisemitism story and yet stay silent now.
I hope that we will also rebuild solidarity across our movement with our Jewish fellows, recognising we were all played for fools by a small group within the party that never had our best interests at heart. Sadly, Twitter is already filling up with almost performatively bad opinions from the kind of faction-invested centrist who believes criticising ‘both sides’ is a surefire way to seem intelligent.
And if that doesn’t seem like a satisfying ending to this piece to you, well, imagine how we feel.
*For an astonishing example of the principles of perhaps the United Kingdom’s most ‘tabloid-y’ broadsheet, here’s a 2006 Telegraph opinion piece proudly defending Pinochet.
**At this point, sadly, my sources must drift away from traditional media. Perhaps the bank holiday weekend is delaying major newspapers’ reporting on this scandal. We shall see.
