“Corbyn never apologised” – an unkillable myth pedalled in mainstream media
Added 13th April 2023:
The BBC has published a correction about the Newsnight programme. See postscript at the end of the article.
In his introduction to a discussion of the NEC decision to ban Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour candidate in the next election Mark Urban referred to “his refusal to offer any kind of apology” [for the antisemitism row] and, in any election campaign “he would refuse to apologise as he has done all the way up to now” (BBC’s Newsnight, 28 March, starts 17.22)
On Politics Live on 27 March (starts 08.15 mins) Siobhan McDonagh states that “Jeremy can sort this out, he can apologise for the antisemitism, he can acknowledge that he is deliberately and belligerently belittling and demoting the amount of antisemitism that went on in the Labour Party… if Jeremy were to say look, in retrospect, things were bad, I should have done more, antisemitism is always wrong, then…”
Even more surprising is James Ball, global editor at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, who in a discussion on the topic in Feb 2022, tweeted: “Saying sorry for doing something immensely shitty shouldn’t be all that difficult, it’s just that Corbyn literally never apologised for anything.”
Earlier this year Liz Kendall MP appeared on the Peston show, alongside Jeremy Corbyn, on 11 January 2023.
“I’m afraid Jeremy only has himself to blame for the situation he’s in because of his failure to apologise for what happened in the Labour Party, when he was leader, on antisemitism,” said Kendall.
To which Robert Peston asked: “What apology – because maybe he’ll do it now – what apology would you want from Jeremy?” presenter Robert Peston asked. And Kendall replied: “A full and frank apology, which has never happened.”
In this programme Corbyn did indeed come back, saying (correctly): “I have explained many times and apologised many times for the situation”, before repeating the point he had often made, “evil as antisemitism is, the scale of it within the party was grossly exaggerated”. It was met by Liz Kendall with expressions of disbelief and the statement that “people who think the problem was exaggerated are part of the problem themselves”. This was taken as further evidence that Corbyn had never apologised and Peston, to his discredit, did not intervene to correct her.
How can journalists as experienced as Peston, Urban, Bull and the BBC Politics programme allow such obvious untruths to be presented as unquestionable fact? They may not like the fact that Corbyn apologised repeatedly, they may think the apologies were not good enough, but simply to make the claim that they don’t exist should beggar belief.
The most minimal search would show the claim to be without foundation.
Here is the Guardian on 3rd December 2019: “Corbyn apologises for antisemitism in Labour party.” It ends with the statement: “Corbyn has previously apologised for the hurt caused to the Jewish community in a social media video released in the summer of 2018.”
Here is the same story on the BBC: “General election 2019: Jeremy Corbyn apologises over anti-Semitism row.”
From Politics Home (18 Mar 2018) we have “Jeremy Corbyn finally apologises for protesting against removal of anti-Semitic mural” which reports a letter from Corbyn the heads of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council. It includes this: “I am sincerely sorry for the pain which has been caused, and pledge to redouble my efforts to bring this anxiety to an end.”
The Independent carried this on 24th April 2018: “Jeremy Corbyn apologises for Labour antisemitism ahead of meeting with Jewish leaders”.
Saul Staniforth highlights the hypocrisy in a tweet referring to the BBC: “The way journalists, who presumably think they’re people of integrity and professionalism, brazenly lie about Jeremy Corbyn”, and follows it with a split screen video, counterposing a clip of Mark Urban’s report with one of Jeremy Corbyn a making a fulsome apology.
Finally, Corbyn’s statement following the publication of the EHRC report begins with these words: “Antisemitism is absolutely abhorrent, wrong and responsible for some of humanity’s greatest crimes. As Leader of the Labour Party I was always determined to eliminate all forms of racism and root out the cancer of antisemitism. I have campaigned in support of Jewish people and communities my entire life and I will continue to do so.”
It also says that “Anyone claiming there is no antisemitism in the Labour Party is wrong. Of course there is, as there is throughout society, and sometimes it is voiced by people who think of themselves as on the left.”
Futhermore, “Jewish members of our party and the wider community were right to expect us to deal with it, and I regret that it took longer to deliver that change than it should.”
What caused uproar was when this was followed by this statement: “One antisemite is one too many, but the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media. That combination hurt Jewish people and must never be repeated.”
The evidence for exaggeration seems incontrovertible as we have often argued on this website (see for example It’s obvious that Labour’s antisemitism problem was overstated). But that is another issue which we will no doubt return to later.
Here we hope we have simply driven a stake though the heart of the false allegation, now incontrovertible mainstream media “fact”, that Corbyn never apologised.
Postscript – BBC Corrections and Clarifications
The BBC’s responses to editorial, technical and corporate issues.
Newsnight
BBC Two, 28 March 2023
In an item about Labour’s National Executive Committee voting to stop former leader Jeremy Corbyn running as a candidate in the next general election, we referenced the row over antisemitism in the party and Mr Corbyn’s “refusal to offer up any kind of apology for that”. We also questioned whether he would refuse to apologise “as he has all the way up to now” if antisemitism came up in an election campaign.
To be clear, Mr Corbyn apologised for antisemitism in Labour on a number of occasions as Party Leader, including ahead of a meeting with Jewish community leaders in April 2018. In 2020, after the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) investigated antisemitism in the party and found unlawful harassment and discrimination, Labour suspended Mr Corbyn after he said he did not accept all the EHRC findings and said the scale of antisemitism had been ‘dramatically overstated’.
13/04/2023
Individual outrage about the injustice and antidemocratic nature of Labour HQ’s interference with Islington CLP’s candidate choice can’t be forceful enough to change Labour HQ’s behaviour. The action has to be collective (even if that only means 2 or 3 friends getting together to agree a small joint plan and to encourage each other to see that plan through).
There are individuals and groups within the Islington CLP who’ve already bravely and publicly stated their dissent from Labour HQ’s action. To what extent are they directly – or their supportive trusted personal contacts – willing to organise carefully calibrated actions to render null and void HQ’s interference?
While avoiding confrontation and the risks of party disciplinary action to the extent that’s possible, are enough of the Islington members sufficiently determined to deny electioneering help and funding to HQ’s candidate for as long as it takes until the candidate or HQ changes their minds about him standing?
Successful electioneering in the UK depends partly on what the party VOLUNTEERS are prepared to do to help their candidates; paid help is limited to what the Electoral Commission is prepared to okay. If the volunteers are unwilling to volunteer as normal, the power of the party machine to MAKE them behave “acceptably” is somewhat limited.
Very important article, thanks Richard.
Don’t you think they probably know exactly what they are doing? I mean Corbyn’s apologies were fairly well covered in the media at the time. I think this is very serious disinformation rather than misinformation.
In addition, what hasn’t been covered is the Forde/ Leaked/ Labour Files reports where GLU staff were ignoring genuine complaints of antisemitism (to prioritise the factional purge) and then lying to Jeremy that all complaints were being progressed. Lying by omission?
It is all extremely worrying for our democracy and needs to be challenged.
Scroll down this lecture on impartiality in reporting to City University journalism students by Robert Peston and you may discover more on the motivation of his coverage of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
https://londonpressclub.co.uk/?p=403
Richard Kuper’s article unfortunately entirely misses the point.
There is no doubt that Corbyn has repeatedly apologised for Labour ‘antisemitism’ despite what the lying hyenas of the ‘free’ press have said.
But that is the problem. Instead of Corbyn pushing back against the false allegations of ‘antisemitism’ he apologised. Not only did this do him immense harm, his apologies weren’t even recognised as such.
What Jeremy should of course have done was to call out these false allegations of ‘antisemitism’ for what they were – false, contrived and confected allegations that were about Zionism not anti-Semitism.
The lies are ring-fenced by the media and by Corbyn’s enemies in the Labour Party, into which sad group we now see Ed Miliband ignominiously corralled. The ring-fencing has to be kept up in order to prevent Jeremy from being rehabilitated, since that would open a can of worms and threaten Starmer’s bid to remake Labour in his own image and win power at the 2024 election. Jeremy is an unassuming and good-hearted man, and whenever the public are allowed a good look at him they warm to him, despite the incessant vilification to which he has been subjected. His most persistent critics appear simultaneously to hold two discrete opinions of him: that he is a harmless incompetent with hopeless political instincts, and that he is a dangerous firebrand who can’t be allowed anywhere close to a position of power. The truth is, of course, that he is neither of these things: he is an anti-racist social democrat who wants to improve the conditions of life for working people at home and help restore justice and peace in the many international conflict zones. Mild as they seem, these are rare qualities in modern political life, which is why he is loathed by the establishment and by US hawks like Mike Pompeo. I first became aware of him in 2015 during the Labour leadership contest; since then I have been increasingly impressed by his courage, his integrity, his selflessness, his resilience and his generosity of spirit. As regards his political instincts, despite standing more often than not against the orthodox opinion of the day, he has been on the right side of history again and again throughout his long political career. His contribution to modern political life is irreplaceable and it is our duty as socialists and human beings to make sure that he emerges from the current invidious mess with his reputation and legacy intact.
Have you noticed in recent days that the barrage of “failing to apologise” tropes has been supplemented by “not showing contrition”? They’re ratcheting up the rhetoric.
I have been watching the short YouTube clip from the
“Not The Andrew Marr Show” about “breach of natural justice” referred to by Martin Forde :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPFniaCPj8I –
apparently allowable in disciplinary proceedings according the Labour Party Rule Book. I shared the despair of the participants from the short clip.
After having a good think about this, given the meaning of “natural justice” as “fairness in judicial practice” I considered what its breach (ie unnatural justice)
means logically.
This is simple – it is “unfairness in judicial practice” so it is unsurprising that for example retrospective application of proscription is allowed in Labour Party disciplinary proceedings. Other examples were given by Pamela Fitzpatrick for there is apparently no limit to the amount of unfairness that is allowed – one example being ignoring inconvenient evidence. That is surely why “natural justice” should always be pursued by every political Party in a civilised society.
In other words Natural Justice is a moral necessity.
It’s as though there’s a parallel EHRC Report that only this Labour Party’s insiders, and a few select journalists, know about.
I often wonder if journalists, like Peston, ever take a few moments to review their interviews – with the likes of Streeting and Kendall – to fact-check what they’ve said.
Or are they too eager to get back to the Green Room, to listen-in to more juicy gossip, to add to their portfolio.
One last thing – in Starmer’s Motion, he never mentioned anti-Semitism. Yet, afterwards, we heard of nothing else. Is libel more egregious than slander, on a nationally, televised interview?
‘Corbyn guilty of not controlling antisemitism’
He tried to speed the investigation up.
So ‘Corbyn guilty of interfering in antisemitism investigation’
“Off with his head!”
Whatever he might have done, or not done, he’d have been pilloried. He’s the victim of a truly criminal campaign to delegitimise him.
But I do wish he’d finally come out in full support for the previous innocent victims of the campaign who suffered on his watch, and
have not yet been exonerated and apologised to.
@Tony Greenstein – he should of, but that would of probably got him fully binned. The Labour Party seem to use him like the media use people like Owen Jones – to give the appearance of opposition and set the limits of left debate. If he was really that much of a threat, he would of been expelled years ago. Instead, hes stuck around.
It is clear that the repeated accusations of “failing to apologise” are a carefully-choreographed and contrived campaign of disinformation by the MSM on behalf of the establishment.
Once again, we see “The Big Lie”.
The rhetoric is being ramped-up and (as usual) there is only one permitted narrative.
Corbyn never had anything to apologise for.
Corbyn’s error was to fail to defend himself by calling-out the false accusations from day-1.
The “Big Lie” should have been nailed from the start, instead of repeatedly backing off and running away from the fight.
There is an old trade union saying that every shop-steward should know :
“If you can’t defend yourself, you’ll never be able to defend your members”.
Another one is:
“Once you start running, you’ll never stop”.
My MP lost his seat to the Tories; it had been Lab for 60 years and he was anti-Corbyn long before antisemitism was mentioned he explained how Corbyn was offered Dep.PM if he stood down. He refused and that was when all the accusations started. Had they stayed with him we might have won. I know that the party membership expanded enormously.
Gordon Bennett, how many times do I have to keep repeating this on JVLs website! Given that the WHOLE of the MSM were hostile to Jeremy, and given that they have total control of the narrative, he was ALWAYS, from the outset, in a no-win situation, and I’m sorry, but both Tony Greenstein and John Coats are, in my view, fraudulently smearing and discrediting Jeremy.
John Coats says, in effect, that Jeremy should have refuted the A/S lies from the outset etc, and yet the reality is that he DID. And got clobbered for it. And so yet AGAIN – for about the fifth time on JVLs website! – here’s (part of) the (faux and confected) response to Jeremy denying and refuting that the LP had an A/S crisis; this when the A/S black op first really kicked off with the Naz Shah/Ken Livingstone episode at the end of April 2016:
‘Labour in crisis over ‘anti-semitic’ scandal: MPs demand Corbyn gets his ‘head out of the sand’ after Red Ken is SUSPENDED….’
The Robert Peston lecture cited by John Booth is extremely illuminating. It is clear that Peston sees ‘Labour Party antisemitism’ as an established fact exempt from any of the usual journalistic rules about critical scrutiny. On other major issues (e.g. Brexit) he accepts that however firm his own views may be it is still necessary to consider contrary ones. The idea however of even considering the possibility that the Labour Party has not had an antisemitism problem has obviously never even crossed his mind.
Did the EHRC report say that Labour was ‘institutionally antisemitic’?
No.
No Mr Rosen, it did not….another unkillable myth it seems!
You might like to sign this petition: “Labour – Let Jeremy Corbyn stand!”
https://chng.it/95DFWBsv
And this one:
“Restore the whip to Jeremy Corbyn – let Islington North’s members decide their candidate!”
https://www.change.org/p/restore-the-whip-to-jeremy-corbyn
Spot on article
It seems that the general institutional syndrome described above is well known to those studying organisational pathologies.
It is called “Corporate Dementia” and is thought to be caused by an ideologically toxic environment, which may afflict both an institution and its employees. However the typical pattern of rapid spread of the syndrome suggests that an unidentified virus may be involved.
There is no known cure for the institutional form, but individual employees of an afflicted organisation may gain some relief by quitting their job.