By Mike Howard, Hastings and Rye Labour member
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is one of those Jewish members of the Labour Party fighting against the unjust disciplinary action of the Labour bureaucracy. Here, republished from the website of Jewish Voice for Labour, she exposes the Labour Party’s “Incendiary” antisemitism code and the double standards that have been applied in relation to it.
The Labour Party code was the basis upon which I and others have been suspended and it has only been published as a result of our action in the High Court. As a result of its publication, after previously being kept hidden, there may be many more legal challenges from other Labour Party members who have been unfairly disciplined.
Double standards applied at different times
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi writes: The Labour Party’s newly published Complaints Handling Handbook includes a Code of Conduct about antisemitism adopted by the National Executive Committee in July 2018 and then quietly shelved after being denounced as an example of Jeremy Corbyn’s alleged disdain for Jews.
In September 2018 the party came under extreme pressure to rely exclusively on the full International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism (IHRA WDA) – despite its manifest flaws. And so the Code of Conduct, described by then NEC member Jon Lansman as “the gold standard”, was thrust aside.
Now, more than two years later, it has emerged that party staff found the non-legally binding IHRA WDA inoperable without reference to the Code. But members facing antisemitism charges were not told this.
Six Labour Activists for Justice (LA4J) and two others supported by the Left Legal Fighting Fund are jointly taking action over what they believe is their unlawful treatment by the Party.
Exposing the hidden code has formed a central part of the LA4J claim because, as they explain on their crowd-funding page, to date, “complainants have been denied the opportunity to understand the Party’s approach to antisemitism before making complaints and respondents have been denied the opportunity to make submissions on it.”
LA4J say they may not be the only people to benefit from publication of the Code. They say that “everyone still subject to investigation can make submissions on the Code (if relevant) and everyone sanctioned since 2018 could ask for their investigations to be reopened in light of the Code (if it is relevant to their investigations).”
This could apply to hundreds of party members, at least 30 Jews among them.
Too “incendiary” to publish
Why has the Code remained secret for so long? One strong reason emerged during discussion in a High Court hearing on April 1 of a witness statement by Party lawyer Alex Barros-Curtis. Publishing the Code, he said, would have been “politically incendiary.”
That statement certainly seems plausible, given the uproar that greeted the Code in the summer of 2018. Then commentators and lobbyists hostile to Corbyn lined up to attack the party in outraged terms for what they wrongly labelled “Labour’s definition”. Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said the Code sent “an unprecedented message of contempt to the Jewish community”. He wrote to NEC members urging them to “make the right decision for Britain”.
In a joint statement, Board of Deputies President Marie van der Zyl and Jewish Leadership Council Chair Jonathan Goldstein said the party’s decision was “impossible to understand” and further eroded “the existing lack of confidence (sic) that British Jews have in their sincerity to tackle antisemitism within the Labour movement.”
Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland tweeted: “It means Labour now holds its members to a lower standard of anti-racism than the law demands.”
The Campaign Against Antisemitism said the Code “is driven by the pro-Corbyn faction’s obsessive hatred of the Jewish state and seems to be designed to give free rein to certain forms of antisemitic discourse that have no place in a liberal democratic society.”
Not a word of protest that the same code is used today
Today however, the very same Code of Conduct, with not a word of its 16 paragraphs altered, has provoked no protest from any of these self-proclaimed champions of British Jewry.
There was some grumbling in the Daily Telegraph, which on April 4 bemoaned the fact that the disputes statistics published along with the Handbook revealed very few expulsions. But it reassured its readers that, in the words of a Party spokesman, “The cases highlighted refer to previous decisions which do not reflect the current approach of zero tolerance to anti-Semitism… Under Keir Starmer’s leadership, we are continually improving and strengthening procedures to root out antisemitism from our party.”
Like the recently published Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which goes much further in challenging and undermining the IHRA working definition, Labour’s Code of Conduct has so far been studiously ignored by establishment media previously obsessed with defining and “rooting out” antisemitism.
“…have they changed their minds?”
Labour Activists for Justice comment wryly about the nonchalant reception now for the document that, when championed by Corbyn, was excoriated as giving free rein to antisemitic discourse: “Could it be that the objectors haven’t noticed, or have they all changed their minds and it isn’t antisemitic after all?”
At the preliminary hearing last month, the judge threw out the Party’s arguments that the case had no substance. We believe that this Code would have remained unpublished if it were not for the fact that its secret application was part of the LA4J court case.
LA4J are seeking transparent and fair processes for ALL Labour Party members.
Fighting a legal case is extremely costly. Please donate towards the continuation of our case if you can, and please share widely.
