General British politics discussion thread

You need to try harder than that

The accusations were blown out of all proportion. It was ludicrous.

There were even people accusing Labour Party members who were dead and the vast majority of accusations were simply he said/she said type nonsense that was impossible to verify either way. People were getting suspended and expelled from the PLP on the flimsiest of finger pointing.

The whole fiasco was shameful on behalf of the accusers and those that facilitated them.

I don't blame Corbyn for not accepting this nonsense. It was a witchhunt designed to destroy him dressed up in empty cries of antisemitism. An often baseless accusation which a lot of people have learnt to see through over the past couple of years with Israel's behaviour and their subsequent bogus claims when they're called out on it.

If there's one thing Corbyn was correct about, it was Israel.

Of course he was correct about Israel and the campaign of fake antisemitism yet you still fail to condemn the smear against him

Yes they were random accusations and a lot of them were bullshit like supposedly hearing someone say something at a function a number of years previously. You can't do anything about rubbish like that. There were even people making claims about people that weren't even in the party. Corbyn et al tried to take these claims seriously but found it an impossible task to actually investigate further because there was nowhere to go with it. And yet he was still suspending and expelling party members merely on the basis of an unproven accusation.

I followed all of this smear campaign quite closely when it was happening and one thing I noticed was the sheer lack of evidence or solid proof being put forward to back up this idea that Labour had an "antisemitism crisis". You'd hear various news items about someone making some claim, but there was never anything shown to back the claim up. The most obvious reason is that you cannot back up hearsay. But even with something like a tweet, the actual tweet was never shown. These claims were just taken at face value and the accused had no voice.

In any case, a rate of 0.08% of people being (merely) accused of being antisemites in the Labour Party was well below the national average. But the way some people would have you believe it is that the entire party were antisemitic monsters to a man. There were 1106 allegations of antisemitism against the Labour Party logged with 433 were by people with no association with the Labour Party at all and 220 were dismissed due to lack of any evidence. The ongoing 453 cases were still being investigated when Labour lost the election in 2019.

Corbyn's biggest problem is that he wore his polices on his sleeve and one of those policies was being in favour of a Palestinian statehood. For that alone, he had to go.

The smear campaign was extensive, relentless and it worked, and the party we have now is the result.

Right wing media and brain dead people who blame Labour for the boats,egged on by reform and the tories who are the ones really responsible for the boats by causing brexit-at least with the way trump is acting people are starting to realise staying close to Europe is best for Britain.I'm sure you've heard the rumours the UK may attempt to rejoin the EU.

There was no evidence the party was systemically racist. Corbyn and other left wing members kept criticising Israel and as soon as Starmer became leader, the narrative started going around that they were all hardcore racists driven by anti-Semitism pure and simple.

It ended up with Starmer proposing a resolution to the National Executive that Corbyn was "unfit to hold public office" - such was his devotion to Israel and Netanyahu.

Meaningless in the sense that the chances of a two-state solution are probably 0.1% right now. It's a great cop out by western political leaders to seemingly go against Israel by saying they favour a two-state solution, when they know full well the chances of it happening are non-existent.

"We recognise the state of Palestine", "we favour a two-state solution" doesn't seem worth a hill of beans when the Israelis are saying hell will freeze over first before they allow it to happen. It would / will probably need the total collapse of the Israeli regime and Zionism itself before it could occur.

Jewish Voice for Labour wrote a damning report on the EHRC's investigation - a chapter I'll reproduce below - where it found that there was…

- no evidence of widespread antisemitism, direct discrimination or victimisation in the Labour Party
- no evidence that Corbyn or his office were responsible for the Party's poor handling of complaints
- no evidence that Corbyn or his office sought systematically to undermine antisemitism complainants or protected those accused
- a dangerous disregard by the EHRC for the elementary democratic as well as legal principle of free speech.

1

What Did—and Didn’t—the EHRC Report Find?

The ‘Labour antisemitism’ controversy comprised three main allegations: that elected leader Jeremy Corbyn MP was an antisemite, that under his watch antisemitism in the Party became widespread and that antisemitism within Labour was institutionalised as a consequence of Corbyn’s leadership as well as the influx of his supporters into the Party.

The EHRC Report has been presented as a vindication of these claims. As will be seen, this is a material exaggeration of its findings. The Report does not accuse Corbyn of unlawful or otherwise antisemitic conduct, does not address claims that antisemitism became widespread and upholds only the most limited of those allegations levelled under the rubric of ‘institutional antisemitism’.

Corbyn. Corbyn was publicly branded an antisemite by, among others, Margaret Hodge MP and the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA). The latter was a complainant in the EHRC investigation. But the Report does not make findings against Corbyn of unlawful or otherwise antisemitic conduct.

Prevalence. The Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) alleged, in its closing submission to the EHRC, that Labour had played host to ‘a relentless flow’ of ‘endemic’ antisemitism, ‘that antisemitic conduct is pervasive at all levels of the Party’ while ‘[a]ntisemitic abuse is now a common experience for Jews attempting to attend’ party meetings. The Report provides no support for these allegations. The EHRC sifted materials submitted to it as well as public domain sources to identify approximately 220 antisemitism allegations. These were largely selected from sources critical of Labour under Corbyn’s leadership. From this initial pool, the EHRC examined a sample of 70 complaint files and in respect of two Labour Party ‘agents’ made findings of unlawful harassment. The Report offers no justification for generalising from these two cases to a slur on a voluntary association of more than half-a-million members.

The EHRC Report emphasises, in a much-quoted phrase, that its two findings of unlawful harassment represented ‘the tip of the iceberg’. It elsewhere refers to ‘many more files’ showing ‘evidence of antisemitic conduct’. But this is grossly misleading. The EHRC confined its investigation to antisemitism complaints, which precludes any extrapolation to the wider membership. Even had all the approximately 220 allegations of antisemitism it identified been valid, and even on the assumption that each related to a different Labour Party member, this would have represented less than 0.05 percent of the Party’s membership.

In addition to its findings of unlawful harassment, the Report refers to 18 ‘borderline harassment’ cases where there was insufficient evidence to hold the Labour Party ‘legally responsible for the conduct of the individual’. Put otherwise, the EHRC did not find evidence of unlawful harassment in the large majority (above 70 percent) of complaint files it examined, even as its sample was culled primarily from sources alleging institutional antisemitism in the Labour Party and even as its operative definitions of both ‘antisemitism’ and ‘harassment’ were evidently expansive. The JLM alleged that ‘antisemitic conduct is pervasive at all levels of the Party’ but it would seem that the EHRC did not find it pervasive even within a sample of antisemitism complaints selected mainly by the prosecution. Furthermore, we have good reason to believe that at least several of these 18 ‘borderline’ cases involved allegations of antisemitism that were supported by no persuasive evidence.

The JLM also levelled specific allegations of antisemitism as well as unlawful conduct against Chris Williamson, formerly a Labour MP, and Jackie Walker, former Vice-Chair of the Corbyn-supporting campaign group Momentum. Both individuals were subjected to vitriolic public criticism in relation to antisemitism while their expulsion from the Party was set as a litmus test for the Party’s opposition to antisemitism. The EHRC examined complaints related to both individuals. But the Report does not make findings of unlawful conduct regarding either Williamson or Walker.

Institutional. ‘Institutional antisemitism’ is not a legal term and does not appear in the EHRC’s findings. It is often used rhetorically as a synonym for ‘pervasive’ – as noted, the Report makes no findings on this count – or more precisely in reference to policies or practices that intentionally or unintentionally discriminate against Jews. Submissions to the EHRC from the CAA and JLM charged Labour with direct discrimination, harassment and victimisation. But the EHRC Report did not make findings of direct discrimination or victimisation.

The Report does find that two Labour Party practices amounted to unlawful indirect discrimination: political interference in antisemitism complaints and a failure to provide adequate training to staff handling those complaints. The definition of ‘indirect discrimination’ will be returned to in detail below. For now, it suffices to note that the finding does not mean the Labour Party treated anyone differently on the basis of race and/or religion; that would have resulted in a finding of direct discrimination. On the contrary, any finding of indirect discrimination presumes ‘equality of treatment’ that, perhaps unintentionally, has unequal effect.

It was common ground in the ‘Labour antisemitism’ controversy that the Party’s complaints procedures were flawed, and this consensus finds validation in the Report. But the political sting of the ‘institutional antisemitism’ charge lay elsewhere, in suggestions that Corbyn’s office had routinely obstructed the timely resolution of antisemitism cases and protected those accused. The Report supports neither allegation and tends, if anything, to refute them. Those faults it does identify are mostly the kind of mundane bureaucratic problems (morale, efficiency, resource allocation) that often afflict large organisations. These failings appear to have disadvantaged respondents no less than complainants and, crucially, to have been mitigated once Corbyn’s allies gained control of the disciplinary apparatus.

A chasm separates the public as well as legal allegations against Labour, on the one hand, from the EHRC’s findings, on the other. The national controversy surrounding ‘Labour’s antisemitism crisis’ centred on allegations that the Labour Party had come to pose an ‘existential threat to Jewish life in this country’ as, ‘within living memory of the Holocaust, and while Jews are being murdered elsewhere in Europe for being Jews, we have’ as the Party’s leader ‘an antisemite’ who ‘has done more than anyone in modern political history to bring about the rise of antisemitism’. Between them, the JLM and CAA submitted to the EHRC ‘thousands of pages’ of documentation purporting to prove that the Labour Party was so ‘consumed’ by ‘antisemitism’ as to have become ‘an environment that is profoundly hostile to’, and ‘no longer … safe’ for, its Jewish members. The EHRC spent more than a year investigating these allegations. Its key findings, at the culmination of this exhaustive and exhausting process, may be summarised in a sentence: One National Executive Committee (NEC) member and one local councillor made between them a handful of harassing comments, the Labour leadership at times intervened in politically sensitive disciplinary cases and the Labour Party did not adequately train its complaints staff.

Yet even these findings, limited as they are, cannot withstand factual or legal scrutiny.

labour under Corbyn were a complete joke and more like a student union then an actual political party fit to run a country.

Principles are great, until it comes to actually running a country and having to balance books and mange international diplomacy.