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The Labour Files: where is the outrage, where is the action?

LEAH LEVANE looks at the shocking revelations from a recent investigation into the anti-Corbyn conspiracy and asks if Labour cannot act on this now, how can it be trusted by its members in future?

YOU would not know it from the mainstream media — or the Labour Party — but Al Jazeera has produced four devastating films about machinations designed to discredit Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters.

The mainstream media amplified every criticism, every stumble and every allegation until the narrative of Corbyn’s unsuitability and Labour’s anti-semitism became accepted as “the truth.”

The station’s investigative unit has scoured huge quantities of internal party documents, social media data, emails and covert recordings that reveal the concerted campaign to discredit Corbyn and his supporters, to undermine the democratic procedures of the party and much more.

Since Keir Starmer became leader,  the attacks on those who support the ideas of the last two manifestos has continued, largely under the guise of rooting out anti-semitism.

For anyone interested in democracy, let alone socialism, these explosive revelations make for compulsive viewing — so why has the mainstream media been so silent, only mentioning it, if at all, to discredit it?

The series shows that there is a hierarchy of racism, that anti-semitism has been used as a factional tool, that there has been inappropriate trolling of left-wing party members and much more. Some of the findings echo those outlined in the equally ignored Forde report.

If the revelations are false, where are the rebuttals and demands for correction? If, however, they are true, why is there no investigation within the Labour Party and why is the mainstream media not demanding it?

The programmes look at the “crisis of anti-semitism” that engulfed Labour under Corbyn, labelling him unfit to govern, and shows how senior Labour officials used the party’s procedures to undermine support for Corbyn and to silence debate about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.  

It shows how senior officials in one of the two parties of government ran a campaign against the elected leader of that party; working to silence, suspend and expel party members and whole constituency parties (CLPs) and to block candidates.

It shows, for example, that an allegation about one older Jewish member of a Liverpool CLP was false — and plays a recording to prove that — and yet the allegation of anti-semitism was well-publicised and the rebuttal all but ignored. She has been expelled.

The third episode, The Hierarchy, includes several interviews with black, Asian and Muslim party members and staff. The Forde report stated: “The party’s recent attempts to address the problems with anti-semitism, for example, have not been matched by a commitment to tackle other forms of racism.”

Activists from black, Asian and Muslim communities, buoyed by the hope that a left-wing Labour Party seemed to offer, joining in their tens of thousands, were devastated to see what was revealed in the documents.

Their interviews are harrowing to witness and must have been devastating to go through. Ekua Bayenu said, “There is a point at which people involved in this have stopped regarding people of African heritage as human and I don’t know how you find your way back from that.”

Marcia Hutchinson said: “I faced more racism in the Labour Party than in the rest of my life combined.” Both Bayenu and Hutchinson are long-time community activists and were elected as Labour councillors in Manchester. Hutchinson resigned her seat within a year and Bayenu now sits as a Green Party councillor. This is the calibre of people that Labour can ill afford to lose.

A final, much shorter, episode focuses on Croydon, where the party used information hacked from a journalist to investigate party members and to discipline Labour councillors and activists.

Many of interviews are with party activists who have been put under investigation, suspended or expelled. Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) has noted the disproportionate number of Jewish people who have been investigated for anti-semitism (including all of its executive committee members).

But there are many non-Jewish people whose lives have been devastated by the treatment they have received; for some it has been traumatising to retell their stories but they have felt it essential that the truth gets out.

Direct testimony from hard-working party activists and staff members is particularly poignant and there are more heinous examples than can be covered here. Brighton, Wallasey, Newham and Liverpool CLPs come in for particular scrutiny.

In Wallasey, unfounded allegations of homophobia stuck; the Newham CLPs remain suspended. In Brighton, Damian Mcarthy movingly reports the threats made to his family, threats hanging over them when his father died, and the stress for Greg Hadfield, ex-CLP secretary, leads him to regard the Labour Party as “a criminal conspiracy against its members.”

Others said that free speech has been shut down, that the party was playing with people’s lives and that the situation was quite dangerous.

JVL’s media officer Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and JVL co-chair Jenny Manson also appear in the films, explaining the abuse they and other left-wing Jews critical of Israel have suffered.

We hear a recording of vile insulting and anti-semitic abuse Manson received calling her “Nazi scum” and more, and saying that she would die in a gas chamber. Such abuse is surely related to these oft-repeated allegations of Labour anti-semitism and the grievous insult that Jewish Voice for Labour members are “sham Jews and anti-semitism deniers.”

Many readers will know that Idrissi was elected as one of the representatives of constituency Labour parties to the party’s governing national executive committee (NEC). Two days before this year’s conference, she was suspended and so denied access to the conference and to the NEC.  

There is coverage of how Palestinian voices and perspectives are ignored. Ghada Karmi, a Palestinian activist, expelled from her Jerusalem home as a child in 1948, was stopped from speaking at her CLP about her own experiences as a Palestinian. She has now been expelled from the party.

Peter Oborne, a Conservative and one of the makers of the programme along with Richard Sanders, wonders whether, in the summer of 2019, it was possible to “say anything you liked about Corbyn’s Labour Party.”

Andrew Feinstein is a Jewish South African activist who was an ANC MP when Nelson Mandela was president. He said that, in effect, he was being asked whether “to choose anti-racism as defined by my constituency MP Keir Starmer or to continue to live my principles and values as taught to me by Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.” He is under investigation.

The findings of this documentary series must be investigated and the allegations of racism, if found to be true, must result in disciplinary action.

The Forde report called for, above all, a change to the culture in the Labour Party. The experiences revealed in these documentaries show the culture to be toxic.

This matters beyond the internal workings of the Labour Party, a party that, thanks to the implosion of the Tories, is likely to be the next government. Why should voters trust a party to treat them well when it treats those who volunteer their own time and money so badly?   

Leah Levane is co-chair of Jewish Voice for Labour — she writes in a personal capacity.

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