The pitiful state of the Labour Party has been ruthlessly exposed by the party’s reaction to the results of an all-party parliamentary investigation into anti-Semitism. There can be no doubt that anti-Semitism is a growing problem in society in general, but the evidence has been mounting that it’s a major problem in Labour in particular. And Labour’s senior figures are in denial about it.
Between 2010 and 2015, instances of anti-Semitic hate crime rose by 29%, nearly a third. The National Union of Students (NUS) has a pitiful record of dealing with anti-Semitism, its president Malia Bouattia referring to Birmingham University as a “Zionist outpost”.. The Labour MP Ruth Smeeth received 25,000 – that’s 25,000 – instances of abuse directed at her. Her colleague Luciana Berger received over 2000 abusive tweets within three days in 2014. A fifth of British Jews said they had personally experienced at least one instance of hate crime and/or harassment. We are not talking about a minor story here. This is big news. All political parties have issues with anti-Semitism, but none like Labour, as Jonathan Freedland points out here.
Labour’s problems were such that the party asked Shami Chakrabarti, the former director of Liberty and someone who was not a member of any political party, to conduct an investigation into anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Chakrabarti helpfully concluded that Labour had no issues regarding anti-Semitism and, by an astonishing coincidence, promptly joined the Labour Party and was awarded a peerage by leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has since appointed her shadow attorney general. You can say what you want about Chakrabarti but you cannot convince me that she has not sold out her principles for a seat in the House of Lords.
The report said the Labour Party “consistently and effectively (failed) to deal with anti-Semitic incidents in recent years (which gave) force to allegations that elements of the Labour movement are institutionally anti-Semitic”. This was the unanimous report of an all-party committee, including Labour MPs.The report condemned Corbyn for a lack of “consistent leadership” on the issue, which it said benefited people with “vile attitudes” towards Jewish people. Labour’s so called leadership would have none of it.
According to the BBC, Corby said that the “political framing and disproportionate emphasis on Labour” risked undermining it. He said the committee had heard evidence from “too narrow a pool of opinion” and had “violated natural justice” by rejecting requests from Baroness Chakrabarti and the Jewish Labour Movement to give evidence. The well known anti-Semite Ken Livingstone had the brass neck to say that the committee’s findings had been “rigged”. He said: “The membership was either all solidly Tory – who weren’t friends of Jeremy – [or] filled with [Labour] people who would actually go on a few weeks later, to vote for no confidence in Jeremy.” The absolute cynicism of Livingstone knows no bounds. He is effectively suggesting that the MPs who produced the report acted purely in terms of political advantage. But why would they do that? It is not the way all-party committees work. Livingstone is dismissing the mountain of evidence that Labour has a major issue with anti-Semitism, which it does, including his own, but in accusing the committee of bias he suggests that if some of his hard left comrades had been on the committee they would have ignored the evidence and said, like Chakrabarti that there was no problem. The truth is rather different and as the chair Tim Loughton pointed out, “the Jeremy Corbyn commissioned the so-called independent Chakrabarti report, which we feel wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.” After what subsequently happened, how could anyone honestly say any different? It was a clear case of honours for jobs.
Labour is in a mess on so many levels but to see it mired in anti-Semitism takes it to new depths. And if it is not fit to deal with anti-Semitism, how can it be fit for government? Answer: it can’t.
