University must act to give students justice

WHEN I heard the latest about Labour’s National Executive Committee, I was dismayed — but not surprised.

I’ve noted a tendency for the Labour Party to try to distance itself from these types of accusations, and indeed turn them into an imagined plot to undermine the Labour leadership. I think this is part of a pattern, whereby the Chakrabarti report did not consider the report by Baroness Royall, but Baroness Royall did find that there have been antisemitic incidents at Oxford University, so I would have thought it would be very hard for the Labour NEC report — which I haven’t seen — to dismiss the findings by Baroness Royall.

I think the report should be made public, because justice has to be seen as well as done, and I’m dismayed at the dismissal, because the incidents I

saw reported were not the totality of what has been recounted to me.

What’s been told to me are incidents about spitting at someone, not letting them join a committee unless they denounce Israel — a sort of McCarthyism — and worse.

The NEC decision is all part of the construction that’s been put forward, as I noticed on the Al Jazeera programme last week that any accusation of antisemitism is somehow a plot to undermine the Labour leadership.

Given that we are where we are, I think Oxford University should inves- tigate and punish the malefactors. I don’t know what the university has done — they have not announced anything. After all, Oxford is not in the grip of the Labour Party, and even Oxford’s own student union has asked the university to investigate. So I think for justice we have to look to Oxford University, since it seems unlikely we are going to get it from the Labour Party’s NEC.

Baroness Deech sits as a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, and is a former Principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford