... as Board President sparks uproar with secret labour meeting
A SECRET meeting between Board of Deputies President Marie van der Zyl and Labour general secretary Jennie Formby has sparked anger and confusion amongst MPs and communal leaders.
The JC revealed on Tuesday how Mrs van der Zyl had taken part in the confidential “face to face” discussion last month without the agreement or knowledge of the main Jewish communal organisations.
One senior communal source told the JC: “She was misguided, naïve and badly advised. The community has to stand united and can’t allow itself to be used in any way. We cannot fall into the trap of allowing the Labour leadership to play divide and rule.”
In a statement to the JC, the Board president claimed that she had “spelled out some of the actions that the Labour Party had to take to address shortcomings in the disciplinary process and antisemitism training - which had to be delivered by JLM (Jewish Labour Movement).”
She added that Ms Formby “was not given the kovod” (honour) of a meet- ing with either the Jewish Leadership Council, Community Security Trust — or an official meeting with the Board itself.
The revelation that Mrs van der Zyl, the community’s most senior representative, has broken the united stand with other communal bodies angered many of the Jewish Labour MPs and activists who have led the fight against antisemitism in their party.
A senior figure at the JLM spoke of the body’s “dismay” at Mrs van der Zyl’s meeting with Ms Formby — although its chair, Ivor Caplin, is also believed to have met the Labour general secretary last year.
Under Mr Corbyn’s leadership the JLM has come under increasing attack at Labour branches across the country.
Senior JLM officials said they were especially angry that Mrs van der Zyl
had discussed JLM’s role in antisemitism training with Ms Formby, and would have expected to have been alerted in advance to any meeting with senior Labour figures which involved discussions of their organisation’s affairs.
A senior Labour MP told the JC: “The Board increasingly seem to believe they have the right to act alone on any issue they feel like getting involved with,” adding that her decision to meet Ms Formby was “diabolical”.
Another Labour MP said that Mrs van der Zyl would be “eaten alive” by experienced Labour operators like Ms Formby.
But an influential and longstanding deputy defended Mrs van der Zyl’s conduct, claiming she was right to “hold a ladder” towards the Labour leadership. The deputy also said it was appropriate for Mrs van der Zyl and the Board to act on their own, independent of Labour MPs and other communal organisations, in a bid to resolve the antisemitism crisis.
There was further confusion on Wednesday after the JC revealed that the Board’s senior vice president, Sheila Gewolb, had held another, until now secret, meeting with Jenny Rathbone, the Welsh Labour politician currently under investigation by Labour after claiming Jewish people’s security fears were “in their own heads”. JLM only discovered that the meeting had taken place when it
Marie van der Zyl would be ‘eaten alive’ experienced overators like Jennie Formby
attempted to plan an antisemitism training course for Ms Rathbone with senior figures in the Welsh Labour Party.
Details of the meeting between Mrs van der Zyl and Ms Formby emerged after the Labour general secretary told a stormy meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) on Monday evening how, even though Jewish communal groups “haven’t felt that it’s appropriate to engage with us in such a way”, she had nonetheless “spoken with individuals who are in the organisations — and I’m not talking about people who are in fringe groups.”
The JC subsequently contacted the major communal organisations to ask them to clarify Ms Formby’s remarks.
The JLC and CST said they had been contacted by Ms Formby but neither agreed to a meeting.
Jonathan Goldstein, chairman of the JLC, said that he was phoned by Ms Formby who asked “to continue discussions. I made it clear that I was not prepared to do that until there was progress from the leader and we had seen none since our meeting on 24 April.
“She did raise the question of education and I told her that I would do nothing other than in coordination with the JLM. That was my only contact.”
CST’s Mark Gardner said there had been a text exchange last September in which Ms Formby asked for “links to articles and publications so as she would better understand antisemitism” and he supplied such links.
Labour MPs and peers at Monday’s meeting demanded that Ms Formby get to grips with the backlog of disciplinary cases involving antisemitism and also expressed anger over the collapse of a series of high-profile cases of alleged antisemitism. Ms Formby said: “I don’t think anyone can ever say that we can eradicate antisemitism completely.”
One Wednesday Labour’s Tom Watson publicly berated Ms Formby over her comments. “As deputy leader of the party, our goal should be to completely eradicate antisemitism,” he said.
Mr Watson said Ms Formby must publish data the party holds on the number of allegations of antisemitism involving members, how they have been dealt with and what the sanctions are, to build trust with the Jewish community.
Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger said of Ms Formby’s performance at the PLP meeting: “In a decade of these meetings I have never seen a general secretary behave with such contempt towards Labour MPs.” Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott, shadow chancellor John McDonnell and party chairman Ian Lavery watched on in silence as backbench MPs openly voiced their anger at the general secretary’s lack of progress on the issue. Mr Corbyn did not attend.
The successful motion, which had been proposed by Newcastle North MP Catherine McKinnell, demanded answers from the leadership in one week. It was unanimously passed without any opposition by the PLP at the packed meeting in Westminster.
Resentment increased after Ms Formby confirmed she would not be able to provide a full report answering all 11 questions relating to Labour’s disciplinary processes over antisemitism.
Describing Ms Formby’s address as “platitudinous, dismissive and far from acceptable”, Ilford North MP Wes Streeting said: “In not giving us data, she’s ruled out any possibility of Jewish members and Jewish constituents having confidence in the Labour Party’s ability to tackle it.”
Dame Margaret Hodge said: “I’ve never heard such a vacuous argument, if one really does want to kill that terrible cancer of people feeling we’ve become institutionally antisemitic.
“The most important thing you can do is provide the information and data.”
Another Labour MP later told the JC: “We appear to have gone from zero tolerance to zero concern for antisemitism in our party.”
A letter sent by Ms Formby to all Labour MPs ahead of the meeting, in which she said she was “proud” of the way she had dealt with the problem since becoming general secretary last April, further inflamed tensions.
In a separate development, Labour sources told the JC that the party leadership was planning to hire Prof David Feldman from the Pears Institute to write the material for the party’s antisemitism training. Prof Feldman was vice-chair of the much criticised Chakrabarti inquiry into Labour antisemitism.
But Prof Feldman told the JC: “The Pears Institute has not agreed to write materials for antisemitism training for the Labour Party.” However, he added: “The Institute is part of Birkbeck, University of London. Birkbeck and the Labour Party have had a preliminary discussion about whether Birkbeck could develop a teaching module (not a training course) on antisemitism.”
Labour appear to have gone from zero tolerance to zero concern for antisemitism
IMAGINE FOR a moment that the organisation you worked for had a serious problem and that it was your job to put it right. Not only that, but the problem was one you yourself thought was intolerable and consequently you were utterly determined to sort out. Not rhetorically, but in reality. In taking it on you were determined to be the prime mover. And now ask yourself — soberly and without prejudice — whether the Labour Party general secretary Jennie Formby, in the matter of antisemitism in the Party, resembles such a person. Rhetorically, of course, she sometimes does. Her most recent statement, sent as a message to the Parliamentary Labour Party promises to “eliminate the evil of antisemitism from our movement once and for all”, and adds a “personal” commitment “to reassuring the Jewish community that we stand with them against oppression and prejudice.”
Well, yes, but anyone can say the abstract words. This week, in his State of the Union address, Donald Trump extolled the virtues of bipartisanship and the need to rise above division. Even those applauding him cannot have believed any of it. So, returning to my original question, what would a person who was so committed to getting rid of any taint of antisemitism in her party actually do?
The first thing she’d do is to be up front about what the problem was that she was dealing with and how it came to exist. She’d level with the world about the mechanisms whereby critiques of Zionism had metamorphosed into the acceptance and repetition of antisemitic tropes. She would be open in her analysis that a specifi- left-wing form of anti-Jewish prejudice had long existed and indeed predated the foundation of the state of Israel. She’d say that in order to tackle the problem you had to understand it.
Next she’d recognise that in recent times these problems have become worse. And that far from them being tackled, many in the Party including those close to the leader, had reacted to people making complaints as though they were enemies. Indeed she would want to observe that over the last three years many of her comrades had been forced to move like a tantruming child sent to its bedroom, edged bit by bit across the living room and up the stairs, screaming and holding on to every piece of furniture and every bannister. And only finally stopping when the cause looked hopeless. Walker. Livingstone. Shawcroft. Willsman. The mural. The wreath. The English irony. The obsession with the issue of Palestine beyond all other international issues. The evident penetration of anti-Jewish ideas into the Labour Party via social media. She would be frank about all of it.
Then she would present as detailed and transparent an account as the law allowed of what was being done concretely to fight against such ideas ideologically and by disciplinary measures. She would give numbers for those expelled or suspended, explain in as explicit terms as natural justice allowed, what they had been disciplined for, and, if there was some delay, she would account for it.
Ms Formby has done none of those things. Her message to the Parliamentary Labour Party consisted of a number of pieties, a few shallow claims and bureaucratic obfuscations. How, This is a damage limitation exercise designed to contain reputational harm for example, are we to understand the boast that, “we have nearly completed the process of recruitment to more than double the size of the staff team that handle investigations and disputes processes, and they have been working incredibly hard”?
Or “these reforms have enabled us to clear all of the previously outstanding antisemitism cases from the investigation and disputes panel stages of the process. Only complaints which have been recently received are still under investigation”?
But Jennie, how many staff ? How many cases? How recent is “recently”? What kind of cases are they? Is the volume of complaints increasing or decreasing? And why does your claimed but completely unquantified success in tackling this problem not reflect itself in how Labour members are behaving and writing on social media?
And here, of course, we get to the nub of it. Jennie, no one really believes you.
The sensible observer will conclude that, at best, this is a damage limitation exercise designed to contain the reputational harm being done to the Corbynite Labour Party. It isn’t being done out of conviction or outrage. How could it be?
The simple and obvious truth is that the leader himself and his closest political allies would not recognise an antisemitic trope if it bashed them on the back of the head with a caricature of a Jewish banker.
Nothing you are doing is designed to change their minds.
David Aaronovitch is a columnist for The Times