Labour: still failing over anti-Semitism
“It absolutely breaks my heart to say, but I do not think the Labour Party is a safe space for Jewish people any more.” Thus spoke Izzy Lenga, a Labour member interviewed for last week’s
Panorama documentary on anti-Semitism in the party, said The Observer. The programme found that as recently as this spring, Labour had a backlog of 1,000 complaints of anti-Semitism to deal with, and that so far it has expelled only 15 people as a result of such cases. It also included powerful testimony from Labour whistle-blowers about the way Jeremy Corbyn’s office had interfered with the handling of disciplinary cases by overruling the judgments of compliance officers.
The Labour leadership’s response to the programme was all too typical, said Andrew Grice in The Independent. Rather than address the claims, it attacked the messengers, portraying them as “disaffected” former officials with an axe to grind. It then sought to divert attention by asking why the BBC wasn’t investigating allegations of Islamophobia in the Tory party. Yet the Panorama programme was “flawed”, said Charlotte Nichols on LabourList.org. Among other things, it contained the outrageously hyperbolic claim that Corbyn “has done more to inflame anti-Semitism than any political figure since the Second World War”. Still, it was impossible not to be moved by the testimony of Jewish members who had faced harassment, and of party staff driven to depression by “having to sift through this vile filth” without proper support. Labour should use this row finally to “draw a line under the scourge of anti-Semitism”.
Expecting Labour’s high command to change its spots at this point is naive, said Philip Collins in The Times. Corbyn has always had the means to eradicate anti-Semitism in his party; he has just never bothered. True to form, he’s now resisting demands from Tom Watson, his deputy leader, to publish the party’s submission to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is investigating the party over anti-Jewish racism. The bottom line is that “Labour can rid itself of the virus of anti-Semitism or it can be led by Corbyn and his friends, but it cannot do both”.