Labour Reported

I have just finished reading the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) report into Labour’s anti-Semitism. I have come to the conclusion that The British Labour Party is, indeed, a hotbed of anti-Semitism. However, the EHRC have failed to identify those responsible for fostering hatred against Jewish people. Those people are currently crowing at their success at getting a lifelong anti-racist suspended from the parliamentary party.

Despite the Labour Party declaring it a day of shame and demanding we all wear sack cloth for a defined period the report is not quite the damning indictment some would have liked. Two people, one of whom is no longer a member, were found to have committed unlawful acts. But, for others who were in the firing line the report is more ambiguous. Chris Williamson, for example, is exonerated by the report which resorts to vague accusations “of making public comments about antisemitism smears, supporting members expelled for antisemitism, and sharing social media posts relating to others accused of Holocaust denial and antisemitism.” Perhaps he did, but there is no evidence to support this beyond “an outcry from Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and Labour MPs and peers” An outcry from his political opponents is hardly proof of anything. To quote another court case “They would say that wouldn’t they?” 

Context

This illustration is one that points to the real flaw in the report, and that is that it does not actually contextualise any of this material. The report identifies 220 complaints, but does not tell us how many of these proved vexatious. The report assumes that all complaints are true because they are covered by the MacPherson Principle. This states that if you say you have two heads, then you do indeed have two heads and nobody has the right to tell you otherwise. I would agree that if there are 220 cases of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party this does seem rather high. But, in providing context I would want to know two further things. First, perhaps obviously, out of how many members? But, secondly, how does this percentage compare to other parties and wider society. Sadly, the report provides no detail and we therefore have to accept their assertion that the problem is disproportionate to the Labour Party.

Labour has approximately 550,000 members which means 220 cases is 0.04%. That is not to say those cases are unimportant or do not have a terrible impact on those affected, but does it warrant the huge furore that has been generated? The reports authors claim that “The investigation was prompted by growing public concern about antisemitism in the Labour Party.” But it fails to give any evidence for this. Like so much in the report assertions are made and simply accepted as facts. It is hard to believe that much of this would stand up if subjected to the rigours of cross-examination in court. 

Despite my best efforts I could not find a single poll which rated Antisemitism in the top 10 concerns of the British electorate. It is important to Jewish people for obvious reasons and it has become important to a commentariat who have seen it as a convenient stick with which to beat Labour. In fact, a YouGov poll from 2017 found that antisemitic attitudes were more prevalent in the Conservatives and UKIP than Labour or the Liberals (32% and 30% respectively agreed with at least one of four antisemitic statements.) Despite this a poll of Jewish people carried out 2017 found that 83% of Jewish people surveyed thought that Labour was too tolerant of Antisemitism, compared to only 19% who thought the same of the Tories. As with other polls, see the British Crime Survey for example, people’s perceptions of acts are likely to be greater than the incidence of those acts particularly where the acts themselves are highly politicised and subject to frequent press and media comment. 

Some will argue that this is mere distraction. An attempt to avoid the reality of the situation. Or worse, simply my own unconscious Antisemitism refusing to allow me to see what is self-evidently the case. But, if it is self-evident is it really unreasonable to ask for compelling evidence set in its social and political context to make the case. As somebody who has in the past marched against and confronted far right Antisemites I have never argued that antisemitism does not exist, but as a member of the Labour Party and a trade unionist I have always tried to balance my revulsion at antisemitism with the rights of Palestinians to live a life free of intimidation. For the record I do not hold all Jewish people responsible for the crimes of Israel, but I do think that in conflating the two the pro-Israel lobby (which is not exclusively Jewish incidentally) have themselves been guilty of deflection. This context is entirely absent from the report.

Civil War

But, this would not be my only contextual question. The Labour Party is a political party. There are inside any political party disputes. In the British Labour Party these verge on civil war. Many on the left believe that the allegations of anti-Semitism have been weaponised by the right in order to undermine what they saw as a left-wing take over of their party. This is not unimportant and yet the reports authors ignore this context entirely. The report was prompted by complaints brought by the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) and Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA). Both organisations are pro-Israeli, which they are entitled to be, but have also labelled as anti Semitic anybody who agrees with Jews who do not support their Zionist worldview. 

Angela Rayner, for example, was labelled anti Semitic by CAA for referencing a book by Jewish academic Norman Finkelstein which they claim is “hostile to Jews and Israel“. As a result Ms Rayner is one of 16 Labour MPs reported to the Labour Party this week which it has been given six months to act on. It’s not clear what happens then. The CAA is not a neutral observer. Its Chief Executive, Gideon Falter said on the publication’s release:”Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, the Labour Party became institutionally antisemitic. It drove almost half of British Jews to consider leaving the country.” Not to be nit picky but the EHRC report did not find the party “institutionally antisemitic” and neither is there any evidence that anywhere near half the Jews in Britain sought to leave the country.

According to the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Labour Movement now has 3,000 members following a recruitment drive in the wake of the December election. In the 2011 Census there were 263,346 who identified as Jewish. It is estimated that approximately 1,000 more Jewish babies are born each year than Jewish adults die, so there are probably around 272,000 Jews in the UK currently. This number is important and it is surprising therefore that the report failed to mention it. This means that Jews are less than 0.4% of the population of the UK. 1.1% of all Jews belong to the JLM. I could not find membership numbers for Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) but it has over 11,000 Facebook likes compared to JLM’s 3,000. 

In the report the JLM are mentioned 6 times specifically, though it is not clear when the report mentions Jewish Labour Party members, which it does on 10 occasions, whether it is actually referring to information provided by JLM. For example it is stated that “Labour Party members told us that the comments by Ken Livingstone..caused shock and anger among Jewish Labour Party members. ....Labour Party members also told us that Pam Bromley’s conduct, ..contributed to a hostile environment in the Labour Party for Jewish and non-Jewish members.” This may well be the case but the report fails to make it clear who these members actually were or whether they were affiliated with any other group. In fact, any suggestion of a political agenda by anybody is simply ignored. 

By contrast, the JVL is mentioned only once as a provider of information but with no substantive points attributed. The main difference between JLM and JVL is that one is pro-Israel and anti-Corbyn and the other does not make supporting Israel a condition of membership and has been pro-Corbyn. This may strike some people as unimportant but the truth is that in ignoring this important contextual information the report falls into a fairly typical antisemetic trope. That is it regards all Jews as an undifferentiated mass. 

An injury to one...

In such a view if one Jew is offended this person is taken as representative of all Jews. The Labour Party in uncritically accepting the report in its entirety has sent out official communications to all members in which it states “We have failed the Jewish community, our members, our supporters and the British people. That is why, on behalf of the Labour Party, we want to apologise for all of the pain and grief that has been caused to the Jewish community these past few years.” The suggestion is that there is a single, undifferentiated ‘Jewish community’ and that all have an equal stake in the report. Such a belief is no more true of Jewish citizens than it is of Muslims, or black people or, for that matter, white people or Christians. Meanwhile a prominent Shadow Cabinet member - Lisa Nandy -  was on nationwide radio and used an antisemitic trope declaring that ‘antisemitism punches upward” because Jews tended to be rich (which will of course be comforting to those Jewish citizens struggling by on universal credit).

The idea of a specific Jewish community is a reification of one specific essential characteristic. The report, to be fair, does not use the phrase ‘Jewish community’ preferring the more amorphous ‘Jewish stakeholders’. Unfortunately, this is left undefined, so that Jewish stakeholders could mean almost anybody who those implementing the report want it to mean. The phrase ‘Jewish community stakeholders’ is used three times in relation to the provision of antisemitism training. It is clear from the sections this appears in that the report is, essentially, supporting the right of JLM to be the providers of that training. This despite the fact that they are the smaller of the two Jewish Labour organisations and that they have as a condition of membership a commitment to Zionism. The logic is that the JLM are Jewish and therefore have a unique understanding of antisemitism. The fact that their definition of Jewishness excludes many Jews is conveniently overlooked and will be when the Labour Party capitulates to their demand that they be the arbiters of what constitutes antisemitism.

There is more context that the report lacks. The Labour Party is currently falling over itself to appease what they refer to as “the Jewish community”. In 2010 roughly one-third of Jews surveyed identified themselves as Labour supporters. By 2015, under Ed Miliband’s leadership (Miliband was a Jew incidentally), that support was down to 22%. By 2017  the support had fallen even further to 13%. The reason? It’s hard not to conclude that Labour’s support for Palestinian rights and lack of enthusiasm for Zionism led to a drastic decline in support amongst many Jewish people who found the Conservative Party more to their taste. Is this important? Even if Jews don’t vote for Labour in large numbers they should not expect to be discriminated against. But, that is rather a different proposition to organisations which have no intrinsic relationship with the party demanding that they should have a say in its running. 

The report notes: “In May 2020, the Board of Deputies sent the Labour Party a briefing on a number of cases of antisemitism that it believed were still outstanding.” But, the Board of Deputies has no official standing in the party at all. The majority of the Board are Conservatives. Why are they being allowed to dictate to an independent political organisation how it should deal with disciplinary cases and why is the EHRC amplifying this view that somehow the Labour Party is beholden to an organisation who campaign for a rival party? That all four leadership contenders were prepared to sign up to a set of pledges imposed by an organisation representing a tiny proportion of the electorate has certainly not generated the discussion in the mainstream that one might have expected. The Board of Deputies are fully entitled to take an opinion on the Labour Party, but they have no more right (perhaps even less so given their political leanings) to expect that view to be taken on board and repeated in an official report than any other affiliated organisation. Yet, organisations affiliated with the Party who may well have had Jewish members, trades unions for example, were not asked what they thought.

Balance

The context is not unimportant. The gathering of evidence should be undertaken to ensure that all sides of a dispute have the ability to influence the final report. The report notes: “After the Labour Party submitted its final evidence to us, an 850-page report titled ‘The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014-2019’ was leaked to the press on 12 April 2020. We were not informed that this report was being prepared and it remains unpublished. It was not proportionate for us to require the Labour Party to provide the evidence underlying the report.” Anybody who has read that report (another the party hierarchy barred constituency parties having a view on, so much for the party of free speech)  will note that what it showed was that members of Labour’s full-time staff were working to undermine the elected leader. Part of their campaign was to deliberately delay antisemitism cases because this was becoming an issue in the press. The people responsible for this were not the Leaders office but unelected officials who are afforded anonymity in the report, protected behind the term ‘whistleblowers’. The reports authors entirely omit the reason why this report needed to be leaked. In short following the election defeat those running the party had no intention of releasing into the public domain any material that would weaken the case against the former leader. 

The report concedes that “There is a dispute between the Labour Party and former employees about who began the practice of LOTO interference in relation to all antisemitism complaints in March and April 2018, why and how far LOTO was involved.” Despite the fact that there is no agreement and no reason to believe one side rather than the other the report seems to favour one version of events. Indeed, given the leaked report the balance of probability is that under intense media pressure the Leaders office sought to bring a number of cases, particularly high profile ones to a conclusion. However, the report appears to prefer a version offered by ‘whistleblowers’ even though the evidence is that far from ignoring these cases (there was “no blind spot” to quote Angela Rayner) Jeremy Corbyn was being frustrated in his attempts to have the backlog cleared by full-time officials who were running an anti-Corbyn campaign from within Labour HQ.

For most of the period under review Labour’s bureaucracy was under the leadership of Iain McNicol who left in 2017. He was replaced in 2018 by Jennie Formby. Formby is named 17 times in the report giving the impression that she was responsible for all the incidents reported. McNicol is not mentioned once. Aside from being an unforgivable oversight by the authors this does leave open the charge that the report is itself politically motivated. Indeed, it is noticeable that the only people named in the report are members of Labours left or clearly Corbyn supporters. The only other person named in the report is the current leader who conceded all its points before it was even written. (As an aside, it would be normal practice for a party to study a report before commenting. But, SirKeir made it clear that he would accept all its recommendations from the moment he became leader. As a barrister you would expect him to, at the least, read the thing before conceding).

The report notes that “of the 70 complaints that we investigated, 59 concerned social media.” That is 84%. Given that the vast majority of the complaints were from social media it should have been possible for the report to provide a range of evidence supporting the assertion that this was a major problem. Social media is a catch-all phrase which includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. Whilst Twitter is, mostly, an open platform, Facebook certainly is not. Differentiating between private and public would have been helpful. But the report whilst giving a few illustrative examples contents itself with: “In fact, as the evidence provided to the investigation shows, many people have been deeply offended by incidents on social media, whether or not they were named directly in the social media post.” Which raises the obvious question how many is many?

Politics

The real missing context here is that many people on the left felt that the entire debate was being framed in a way to undermine the Labour leader. There is plenty of evidence, including the leaked report and post-December posts from some Zionists, to support that assertion. I recently had a debate with somebody who claimed to be Jewish who labelled the left, though not me personally, as antisemitic. When questioned he said that the Zionists had succeeded. When I asked in what way, he said “We defeated Corbyn”. This context is not only missed by the report it is dismissed as antisemitic: “Suggesting that complaints of antisemitism are fake or smears,” it declares is antisemitic.

This is the equivalent of saying that any demand for evidence is actually evidence of the crime of which you are accused. Kafka would be proud. Under British and international law it is usually accepted that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Furthermore, that the burden of proof, beyond reasonable doubt, should fall on the accuser. Yet, the day after the publication I received a communication from my MP Anna McMorrin which starts off by referring to “the Jewish community“, a phrase I consider antisemitic, but then issues the following McCarthyite threat: “Keir gave each of us, as members, a stark warning yesterday. He said “If there are still those who think there’s no problem with anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. That it’s all exaggerated, or a factional attack. Then, frankly, you are part of the problem too. And you should be nowhere near the Labour Party either”.“ There is a big difference between saying there is no problem and that the problem has been exaggerated. I can easily believe that, yes, some members of the Party hold antisemitic views and that the entire issue was used by one faction of the party to attack another faction.

I fully expect to be expelled from the party for saying this. But, it is important that we respect the rule of law, specifically the presumption of innocence. The party’s response to the report is akin to implementing thought crime. Such a response should have no place in a mainstream political party and I’m pretty confident many of the allegations would crumble under legal cross examination. 

The report, in my honest opinion, is weak and partial. By naming only those on the left whilst allowing anonymity to those on the right it suggests bias whether that was intended or not. By giving prominence to one, small, Jewish organisation whilst ignoring counter opinion it suggests bias whether conscious or not. By ignoring entirely the febrile political environment surrounding these issues it suggests either political naivety or bias whether conscious or not. By completely failing to provide a social or political context the report has allowed the impression of a major wrongdoing within the Labour Party which despite the media attention did not, as the report states in its opening paragraph, prompt any significant public concern. 

That there is antisemitism in society is, sadly, still the case. However, to infer that this is more widespread in the Labour Party than in other parties, particularly those of the right including the Conservatives, is dangerously misleading. That the Labour leadership have seemingly accepted that the party are the main culprits of antisemitism in the U.K. points to a political project of their own. In my opinion, this report will be used to purge the party of Left-wing activists who remain loyal to Corbynite socialist ideals. Those who remain will only be able to do so whilst sitting on their hands as their ‘comrades’ are castigated merely for asking for convincing evidence. Instead of fighting racism the party prefers to fight its own left wing. The effect of this entire episode has been to increase tension and anti-Jewish sentiment. By weaponising anti-Semitism the right and centrists have made antisemitism easier for the real culprits. The real antisemites are not to be found on the left of the Labour Party but where they have always been in the far right. By attacking its own members the right wing of Labour allow those with genuine hatred of Jewish people to get off scot free. That is of what the party should be ashamed.