The Labour Party has completed its report, entitled, The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014 – 2019, but it has been decided at this point that it should not be published.
However, it has been widely leaked and is circulating on social media. Left Horizons has obtained a copy of the 851-page report, which can only be described as political dynamite. It exonerates Jeremy Corbyn personally of any ‘cover-up’ of antisemitism and shows the disgraceful behaviour of paid officials at the very top of the Labour machine who were actively sabotaging the work of the party, including its fight in the 2017 general election. Party officials, in an arrangement kept secret from the Party leader, were “throwing money” at the safe seats of right-wing Labour candidates at the expense of marginals that Labour might have won.
This is not an academic issue, either, because according to an analysis at the time by The Independent (June 6, 2017), Labour was only 2,227 votes away from winning, by virtue of its failure to win key marginals. We are paying today for the re-election of the Tories, from the run-down of the NHS over the intervening two years and ultimately from many unnecessary coronavirus deaths.
‘Labour’ right wing prefer Tories to a Corbyn victory
We have argued that there are right-wing Labour MPs who would prefer a Tory victory in an election rather than have a radical Labour government in power. Some of these ‘Labour’ MPs are in the Keir Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet today. But this report clearly demonstrates that these MPs have been supported by a parallel anti-Corbyn and anti-Labour network at the very top of the Party apparatus itself.
The best way to illustrate this is to quote the report directly. All of the large blocks of text italicised below are taken directly from the report, mainly from the Executive Summary:
This report is a result of the in-depth and extensive investigatory work which the Party has undertaken to comprehensively respond to the Commission’s investigation, and aims to provide a full and thorough account of the evolution of the Party’s disciplinary processes in relation to dealing with complaints of antisemitism. It sets out the evidence of what has happened…
Secret WhatsApp group
Some of the evidence obtained by the report includes messages of secret WhatsApp discussion groups, set up by Labour staffers. “The contents of these WhatsApp chats were made available to the Labour Party by
one of the groups’ members”, the report adds, “They run to over 400,000 words”. The detail of some of these WhatsApp conversations have also been published, for example here. These conversations show clearly the level of disappointment at Labour’s and Corbyn’s unexpectedly good performance in the 2017 election.
… In 2016, the problem of antisemitism in the Labour Party could be attributed to a small number of individuals who had long held antisemitic views – some of them new joiners, some long-standing members – as well as individuals who had inadvertently strayed into antisemitic discourse through apparent ignorance, often linked to passionately-held views on the conflict between Israel and Palestine. In 2019, the problem of antisemitism is more widespread, because a specific discourse has developed around “Labour and antisemitism” which in itself has antisemitic undertones and has aggravated the problem.
Officials worked against core objective of winning election
Many staff, including GLU [Governance and Legal Unit] staff and senior staff with responsibility for managing and overseeing GLU, were bitterly opposed to the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and seem to have been demotivated, or largely interested in work that could advance a factional agenda. At its extreme, some employees seem to have taken a view that the worse things got for Labour the happier they would be, since this might expedite Jeremy Corbyn’s departure from office…
The evidence of Labour HQ and GLU’s opposition to LOTO [Leader of the Opposition, ie Corbyn] also disproves allegations that Corbyn’s office had influence over GLU’s work even while Iain McNicol was General Secretary, and was responsible for GLU’s failures to act in this period…The evidence found demonstrates that staff in HQ, including in GLU and GSO, did not take instruction from LOTO. On the contrary, they often openly worked against the aims and objectives of the leadership of the Party, and in the 2017 general election some key staff even appeared to work against the Party’s core objective of winning elections.
2016 leadership battle, and “purging the party” of Corbynites
One senior staff member wrote to his colleague that, after the NEC meeting which decided to allow Corbyn on the ballot paper, [in 2016] General Secretary Iain McNicol said “this is the first time the unions have actually chosen to f*** the party rather than support it”…When a former Labour donor mounted a legal challenge against the NEC’s decision to allow Corbyn on the ballot, the Director of GLU, who was responsible for overseeing the Party’s legal defence, said he was “praying we lose in court”.
GLU then initiated and undertook an intensive, large-scale operation to trawl social media and purge the party of some of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters. This operation was falsely described as investigating members for abusive conduct, including antisemitism, but only a small fraction related to antisemitism. Many Corbyn supporters were suspended or excluded from the party on flimsy grounds, while action was not taken against many members on the right of the party reported to GLU for the same conduct. Much of the language for which members were suspended was the same as the language Labour staff used themselves when talking about supporters of Jeremy Corbyn.
While staff boasted privately about creating a “new stasi system”, the scale of the operation was initially hidden from the NEC, with one staff member admitting “we don’t want the NEC to have much of an idea how many there are to review (we’re worried they’ll get scared)”. The NEC was provided with misleading information about the work being undertaken,
Personal abuse of Jeremy Corbyn by Labour staff
Staff repeatedly used abusive and inappropriate language about the leader, MPs, Labour members and about other staff. For example, staff discussed “hanging and burning” Jeremy Corbyn, calling Corbyn a “lying little toerag”; said that any Labour MP “who nominates Corbyn ‘to widen the debate’ deserves to be taken out and shot”; and stated that a staff member who “whooped” during Corbyn’s speech “should be shot”. Senior staff also said they hoped that one Labour member on the left of the party “dies in a fire”. Senior Labour staff used language that was considerably more abusive and inappropriate than that cited as justification for suspending many Labour members who supported Jeremy Corbyn in 2016.
Sabotage of the 2017 general election
The report has been accorded relatively little in the mainstream media. Even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown, it would have been featured with ten times more fanfare if it had been critical of Jeremy Corbyn, rather than exonerating him. We echo the call by MPs Jon Trickett and Ian Lavery, writing in the Tribune, that there should be an inquiry into this sabotage. “If a party member on the Left had engaged in any of these behaviours,” they write, “they would have been suspended subject to an investigation. The same rules must apply here.”
The report should also be circulated to members so it can be discussed in Constituency Labour Parties, branches and in affiliated trade unions. Labour members should know that what many of them suspected or feared is demonstrably true – that not only was Corbyn and Labour working against a tsunami of lies and abuse from the media, but he was having to work against the sabotage of its own officials. The final words in the report are “Never Again”. That has to be the motto of every Labour Party member. We need to demand not only the right of recall of all Labour candidates, by Open Selection, but the top officials of the Labour Party should be subject to election and scrutiny by an elected body made up of lay members.
Let Labour members see the report!
As we have said, we are not going to abandon the Labour Party. It does not belong to well-heeled careerists or bureaucrats. It belongs to those whose daily lives experience austerity, low pay, homelessness, overcrowding, poverty, disability, insecurity and all the difficulties of life in a rotten capitalist system.
In our last editorial, we wrote that “Labour’s right wing, aided by the Tory press and TV, are a part of the political representation of British capitalism”. We can now make in clear that this includes full-time party officials as well as right-wing MPs. But, as we said, “The best activists of Labour’s and the trades unions’ rank and file represent the interests of working people.” The two social forces will inevitably clash and the arena of the conflict will not be on the fringes of the movement, but within the party itself. Never Again.
April 13, 2020
