The Forde Report and the Lessons of the Corbyn Years
TONIGHT – WEBINAR 6 pm
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This is an extremely last minute
response to the Forde Report which has just been issued, all 138 pages of it by
the Labour Party after it ran out of excuses for delaying it any further.
The Report itself leaves a lot to
be desired in terms of accessibility.
Although it is searchable, it is impossible to copy text from it making
it difficult to compile a quick report.
I have therefore resorted to print screening from it!
My initial view is that it could
have been worse but that in accepting certain key points of our, that anti-Semitism
has been weaponised against the left and that the mass expulsions were aimed
solely at Corbyn supporters, that it provides in the end a cover for the
behaviour of the Right.
In particular it exonerates the
Right’s ‘defensive strategy’ which was aimed at protecting the seats of right-wing
Labour MPs whilst refusing to support Labour MPs in marginals who were on the
left or candidates who were standing in Tory marginals.
The Forde Report administers the
mildest slap on the wrist to those members of Labour’s senior staff who ran a
separate campaign in essence from Ergon House with £135,000 illegally diverted.
All it says is that ‘whilst not illegal,
it departed from the approved strategy, it was as such wrong.’
The Report says nothing about staff
who wanted a Tory victory. It does its
best to gloss over the mass of racist, sexist and abusive comments on Labour’s
senior staff.
There is nothing about the
suspension of Brighton and Hove Labour Party (or Wallasey) because of alleged
spitting at the largest AGM it had ever had where the Right was defeated 2-1.
Brighton and Hove Labour Party was
suspended on July 11th 2016.
Karen Buckingham was appointed to investigate. Was she a neutral investigator? This is the transcript of her conversation
with John Stolliday, a vicious right-winger in charge of the Compliance Unit as
recorded on p.113 of Labour’s
Leaked Report
In July 2016,
for example, the “pro-Corbyn” left decisively won Brighton CLP’s annual general
meeting (AGM). Local Momentum activists organised to all gather at a certain
place, then go to the AGM itself. In July 2016, Stolliday discussed overturning
Brighton CLP’s AGM with Buckingham:
overturn AGM,
deal with individuals. Shows what we're up against - a bunch of SWP & Trots
marching straight from a rally to invade a CLP meeting and stuff handfuls of
ballot papers in boxes even when they;re not members of the party
Buckingham
said: “I say act now and worry about [rules and legal issues] later, so long as
we don't do something that'll end up fucknig everything else up”.
The
main points
From the start Starmer
and the Right didn’t want this report but he was forced to commission it. However he stuffed it with supporters including
Baroness Royal who ‘investigated’ the fake allegations of anti-Semitism at
Oxford University Labour Club. She seems
in the interim to have recused herself.
When the Forde Report started
there were immediate threats
of legal action made – however it does not name anyone.
The Report finds that evidence of discriminatory behaviour was
widespread but it doesn’t do the obvious and locate it in the senior right-wing
staff.
It does make the point that ‘Some protected characteristics
more important than others’ but it never asks why ‘anti-Semitism’ was more
important than say anti-Black racism.
It says that the Whatsapp
messages ‘reveal considerable Antipathy to LOTO by staff’. Well that was
putting it mildly.
It rejects the allegation that there was sabotage of the 2017
election campaign by the staff (p.6)
Anti-Semitism
However it repeatedly makes the
argument that there was an ‘anti-Semitism’ problem. It points to how the ‘Authors of leaked
report accepted that anti-Semitism was a problem.’ p.6 describing this as ‘a
mature acknowledgement of problem’
It goes on to say though that ‘sadly
though still some deny existence & seriousness of the problem’. Yet at no point does it explain what this ‘seriousness’
amounts to and it therefore in practice rules out the idea that there was a
deliberate strategy of employing ‘anti-Semitism’
as a weapon against the Left.
Instead it accepts that ‘some
opponents of Corbyn saw anti-Semitism as means of attacking him’ when it is
obvious that all Corbyn’s opponents
from the Daily Mail to the Guardian to Tom Watson and the Hodge saw
it as a wedge issue.
The Report does accept that the Disciplinary
Process was not fit for purpose (p.7)
‘there appear to be no published procedures re use
of administrative suspension, without
clear criteria
One of the problems with the Report
is that it completely ignores the current climate and expulsions in the Labour
Party under Starmer. The least it could
have done was to call for an immediate freeze in all disciplinary processes and
also the reversal of all expulsions
under Starmer. But this of course was
beyond its remit.
Instead we have had a wave of proscriptions
of organisations like Labour Against the Witchhunt and people expelled for the ‘crime’
of having joined LAW in 2017 even though
it was not an offence then. That is
why the Forde Report is largely irrelevant. Instead it says:
Party leaders have consistently recognised that
party is broad church or it is nothing
Section A1.4 talks about the ‘shocking
and wholly inappropriate attitudes among senior staff’ but it says nothing
of they were colluding with i.e. right-wing
Labour MPs.
Section A4.4 talks about legal
threats which were made but they never say who made those legal threats?
It says that (A4.6) in contrast to
the membership who submitted evidence ‘some
key figures within Labour Party were silent’.
Again it doesn’t say who. It goes on to say that ‘Certain prominent
members of party refused to meet panel
or its requests for evidence’. Again no
names were given.
But then Section A4.8 says that ‘Equally troubling was the frequent evidence of
‘denialism’ in relation to the seriousness of the problem of ‘anti-Semitism’. And
this is the key problem with the Report. Yet it says that
‘some anti-Corbyn elements of the
party seized upon anti-Semitism as a way to attack Jeremy Corbyn’
But instead of spelling it out the Report resorts to a cowardly and
fatuous ‘both sidism’:
‘both sides
weaponising the issue’ and failing to recognise the seriousness of anti-Semitism
So let us say it again. As Starmer
has proved with his expulsions of Jewish Labour Party members, at a rate 5
times as high as that of non-Jews. This is what the ‘anti-Semitism’
nonsense amounted to. So to repeat it
once again.
On page 21 it says that ‘There is
nothing in the Leaked Report to support the conclusion that the problem of anti-Semitism
in the Labour Party was being overstated.’
There is also nothing in the Leaked
Report to suggest that anti-Semitism was a problem either. It found a grand total of 2 holocaust deniers
out of 600,000 supporters!
Anti-Semitism was NOT a problem in
the Labour Party and that was why the targets became Jews primarily. The problem was always anti-Zionism and
support for the Palestinians. That is why anti-Semitism itself was redefined as
hostility to Zionism and the State of Israel by adopting the IHRA definition of
‘anti-Semitism’.
Section A4.10 describes what happened as ‘factionalism’
and says that this caused the Labour Party to fail its supporters. Again I
reject this. The problem is that the Left, and in particular Corbyn and those
around him tried to appease rather than fight the Right.
Even more pathetically, the Forde
Report bemoans that the ‘authors of comments in the Leaked Report’ were not
given right of reply. Some of would say that they had already s said far too
much!
Again when it came to the abusive
staff led by Iain McNicol all it says about
staff neutrality (c.1.8) is that ‘a majority of staff didn’t see their
role as requiring perfect neutrality’.
Well that is one way of putting it! Section c1.14 says that ‘a few members of staff
saw their role as to keep party machinery running whilst allowing Corbyn project
to implode.’ Again wherever possible the Report goes out of its way to
protect the abusive and racist senior staff.
Other Points in the Forde
Report
It takes for granted that what Ken
Livingstone said and his suspension and forcing out of the Party was based on ‘anti-Semitism’.
Yet it wasn’t. It was unjust from the
beginning.
There was nothing in the Forde
Report about the expulsions of Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth or myself. Yet none of us were expelled for anti-Semitism. We were targeted by the Jewish Labour
Movement. Yet there is no criticism of the JLM, a socialist society that calls
the racist Israeli Labor Party a ‘sister party’.
My Conclusions
Martin Forde QC is a clever man and
he has made certain concessions in order to whitewash what Labour’s staff and
its right-wing cabal around Tom Watson did.
By accepting that ‘anti-Semitism’ was a problem it effectively
legitimised what they did.
Anyone on the left who believes
that the Forde Report vindicates them is living on another planet. We were promised a mountain and what was
delivered was a mouse.
But the main problem was that Corbyn himself bought into the 'antisemitism' campaign and actually fuelled it.
On page 306 of the Leaked Report we learn that Corbyn and his office, LOTO, were 'chasing for action' over the cases of Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, March Wadsworth and myself in order to 'rebuild trust' with the Jewish community i.e. the Board of Deputies.
Well we know how that panned out!
Tony
Greenstein
I agree. The most glaring omission in the Forde report is the lack of data on the incidence of anti-semitism and other forms of racism in the Labour Party, and, for comparison, in the general population and in the Conservative Party.
ReplyDeleteThe evidence is there from Labour HQ, from the Home Office, & from polling conducted among Conservative Party members. But, somehow, that seems to have eluded a media and political establishment interested only in destroying a resurgent Labour Party which it saw as an existential threat.
The truth is that the incidence of racism of any sort in the Labour Party, (outside its apparatchik class), is astonishing low; lower than in the overall population and very much lower than in the Conservative Party.
Editable and cut-pasteable version of Forde report:
ReplyDeletehttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1PUZi-2w0JXbo7MmAF5Xm8IqFjFxn9STo/view?usp=sharing
To do this for yourself open the un-editable .pdf from within Chrome browser by:
1. Pressing -o on the keyboard with Chrome open or else by dragging the .pdf onto the Chrome icon on the desktop.
2. In the opened .pdf file in the Chrome browser press the printer icon
3. Change the "Destination" field in the print dialog to "Save as PDF"
4. Press the "Save" button and pick a directory and filename.
5 Open the saved file and check you can cut and paste text from it.
Tony at the end you write "We were promised a mountain and what was delivered was a mouse"? Don't you mean 'molehill' or 'a Little Miss Muffet tuffet'? Otherwise, really useful summary of the Forde Report ~ Thanks
ReplyDelete