Starmer slams Corbyn’s EHRC response
SIR KEIR Starmer has said Jeremy Corbyn’s response to the damning report on antisemitism was “just about as bad as you can get.”
In comments that appeared to contradict claims he was open to a compromise over the former leader’s suspension as an MP, Sir Keir said his response to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report “undermined me”.
He added: “We are only in this place because of Jeremy’ s response to the Commission .”
Speaking at the Jewish Labour Movement’s one-day conference, the Labour leader also said he would “look again” at party rules that prevent anyone who supported candidates that fought against the party at elections from rejoining again for five years.
Any relaxation of the rules would take into account Jewish members and MPs who had left Labour over antisemitism claims under Mr Corbyn to back candidates such as Luciana Berger in Finchley and Golders Green
Meanwhile, Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner used her appearance at Sunday’ s virtual conference to launch an out spoken attack on members supporting pro-Corbyn motions at meetings.
She said :“I feel really, really angry actually that there’ s been scenes like that in our CLP meetings.
“If I have to suspend thousands and thousands of members, we will do that .”
The Labour leader also addressed the upsurge in anti-Jewish racism among some Labour members in recent weeks, following the suspension from the party of Mr Corbyn and the removal of the whip.
Sir Keir told JLM vice-chair Ruth Smeeth he recognised these were “hurtful” times for Jewish members whom “we owe so much to.”
He was later asked by a former member who had campaigned for Liberal Democrat candidate Ms Berger if strict rules on rejoining the party could be relaxed as a result of the antisemitism crisis.
Sir Keir said: “The usual rule as you know is that if you support another candidate at an election, that’s a five-year exclusion from the Labour Party.
I think we need to look again at that where people left the party because of antisemitism.
“This is not people who chose to leave the party to go and necessarily support another political party, it’s people who felt driven out of our party.
“Every rule must have an exception for exceptional circumstances, and I’m very happy to have a debate with people about how we make that happen.” The move could also open the door to former MPs who quit the party in 2019 to rejoin Labour under new leadership. Addressing the situation with Mr Corbyn, he said: “I’m deeply frustrated that we’re in this place.” He told the conference :“I felt that over the last six-seven months that we had slowly taken some steps in that direction. We had got better processes in place, we’d begun to have the engagement that we needed. “I wanted the publication of the EHRC report to be a defining moment where we could move on to the mend part of the exercise.”
Sir Keir added: “I can’t tell you how disappointed how I was with Jeremy Corbyn’s response. Because the words he used, what he said coming from the former leader of the Labour Party in response to that report, were just about as bad as you could get. “Everything that has followed in the last few weeks follows from those words. That has exacerbated the pain and the hurt.”
His response was ‘just about as bad as you could get’