David Rosenberg on the leaked internal report
JVL Introduction
David Rosenberg offers his reflections on the leaked internal Labour Party report. He captures well the visceral response so many of us had to the revelations:
“I’m a seasoned political activist. I’ve witnessed political betrayals at close quarters. I’ve seen turncoats do their worst, and heard their cynical justifications as they attacked former comrades. But as I read through the details in the 851-page leaked Labour report that emerged last weekend (the leak was effective BTW – I was offered it by six different sources), I didn’t just feel anger, I felt physically sick.”
He concludes that there must be a fight to unite the party as a whole, around its core socialist values again, with equality and respect at its heart.
This will involve an ongoing fight to educate our members and supporters against all forms of racist bigotries – including antisemitism
This article was originally published by Davesrebellion on Thu 16 Apr 2020. Read the original here.
What does Labour’s leaked report tell us?
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And still no detailed analysis of the report’s findings in the Guardian.
I can’t blame David Rosenberg for attempting to look on the shrinking bright side of this affair and the background ‘antisemitism’ scam. Let’s face it – there’s little enough to fix on that is positive.
But I must pick him up on a couple of points . First of all – the statement that :
“The keenness of EHRC to investigate was also media-driven.”
Hmmm …. was it as simple as that? Even if it was simply so, the motivation calls into question the fitness for purpose of the EHRC. But, in the wider context, the lack of interest in parallel accusations affecting other parties, and prejudgment issues posed by senior management utterances leaves a disturbing question mark over the EHRC.
Then there is the statement :
“… when you examine the detail of these cases it also presents a significant challenge to those who stubbornly deny there is any problem of antisemitism in the Labour party.”
I doubt that many would claim the complete absence of weird racial attitudes amongst the large Labour Party membership. But the minute scale is an absolutely crucial issue in the light of the constructed media narrative.
Beyond that, in the present context, a prompt response from the Party to such egregious actual prejudice would have been perfectly possible had it not been for a dysfunctional administration.
Sadly, the report itself is still embedded in this culture of apologia (as opposed to refutation) that has done so much damage and, I’m afraid, that it has continued under Jennie Formby’s period in office. The ‘Executive Summary’ is desperately keen not to offend the offenders.
In fact, the major issues relating to disciplinary cases flow from the parade of good Labour members with strong anti-racist backgrounds who have been cynically targeted by a corrupt and opaque process that lacks natural justice – continuing under Jennie Formby.
Let’s get the picture straight instead of constantly crumbling in the face of the BoD/JLM lobby.
I agree again with RH – so-called denialism is not about denying there is antisemitism and I’ve sure we all agree with the various reports that show that antisemitic tropes are expressed by those on the left but this becomes more prevalent in both numbers of people and tropes the further right one goes. What we deny is that there is a crisis of antisemitism in the party.
David is right to wonder how those with extreme views, who aren’t many, get anywhere near Labour, and I would say that is probably because party involvement has become much more virtual and less personal in terms of vetting, and most of the issues come to light on social media (which must itself be carefully assessed for reality).
And as I’ve said before, they are not a systematic problem because they obviously do not meet the standard for membership, and we should try and return to days where members are admitted through being proposed and seconded (did we before in Labour.. maybe I’m thinking of my union…). In any case we need to be a people organisation, not an adjunct of Facebook.
Qui bono ? I see Starmer was elected as LP leader.
Interesting to see his next move.
Dave is right to highlight the way in which membership has been relegated to the status of customers. This was accelerated by the Miliband-Collins ‘reform’, specifically designed, like so many ‘reforms’ since at least 1994. to dilute any informed or socialist membership with an ocean of ‘sympathisers’ whose commitment need not extend beyond the vacuous and trivial new Clause 4 if that far. With representative-democratic institutions sidelined in the interests of plebiscitary methods, disguised as ‘a membership-led party’, the stage was set for the empty populism of ‘the many not the few’ to be filled by identitarian prejudices – devoid of any criterion of class. Amongst those prejudices, then, it was not surprising that the medieval identification of Jews with finance, reinforced by nationalist and neo-religious reactionary forces, appealed to some unhinged individuals to see ‘the few’ as Jews. Antisemitism – ‘the socialism of fools’. The systematic and deliberate murder of hundreds of Gaza protestors, followed up by the careful kneecapping of hundreds more, no doubt provoked a small number of those fools, affected by these brutalities, to blame British Jews – particularly when the alleged representatives of British Jews made a point of blaming the Palestinian victims. It was criminally irresponsible to infer from these few unrepresentative ranters that a Corbyn government would be any threat to British Jews – let alone of a sort comparable to 1930s Germany.
The solution is to form a new Leftist party
Excellent summing up – it seems (to me) that there has been a recent rise in intolerance towards all sorts of minority groups – where racists and xenophobes thought it OK to voice their hateful opinions – including antisemitism. Now whether there was a %age rise in antisemitism in the Labour Party is currently unclear given newly revealed obfuscation from certain LP staffers. If so is it possible that they were new members, who joined during the time when the LP had a massive increase in members?
This is made clear in the response by McDonnell in LabourList, who wants to submit the report to EHRC:
“Because I’ve had enough, I had years of asking what was happening on antisemitism. We were being told, according to this report, inaccurate information consistently. If it’s true, that’s appalling. We should never allow this to happen again, we’ve got to end this culture.”
Not only that, but if the report is true, the Labour Party was left implementing a problematic complaints procedure because excellent recommendations by Chakrabarti had been obstructed by the same disgraceful staffers.
The alleged behaviour and language of these staffers makes them unsuitable for employment by any respectable establishment, yet the whole affair is dismissed as “factional” by the MSM ..
Once again I find myself in agreement with RH (are we a faction or a conspiracy, I wonder). The report contains scores of quotes adduced as examples of anti-Semitism that don’t seem to me – not knowing anything about who said them or the context of these remarks – to be anti-Semitic. They might be in a certain context but the fact that the author confidently quotes them without context shows that s/he belives that they are, in and of themselves, self-evidently anti-Semitic.
In fact the author isn’t even reading off the IHRA hymn-sheet. The standards are more draconian. All s/he wants to see is the processes speeded up and standardised and the references to conditionality – the “might”s and “could”s, the “should”s and “may”s of the IHRA – abolished.
One notion that creeps into the report is that offending the Jewish community is anti-Semitic. This false view of the so-called McPherson principle must be rejected (as it was in the Chakrabarti Report).
The author of the Report (who is to be congratulated for his/her diligence in compiling it) stretches the definition of anti-Semitism to include questioning the extent of its penetration in the Labour Party and offending the Jewish community. Not even the IHRA was so brazen as to allege this.
Even if we were naively to imagine that there is a unified Jewish community with unified reactions, there is no reason to believe that it is immune to panics and fears. The task of a political party is to understand these reactions but not necessarily to adopt them or adapt to them. Representatives of the Jewish community where I come from have voiced their fears of growing anti-Semitism in the city and labelled those who deny this as anti-Semites. And yet, if we take the CST figures for the area we will see that there was not a single attack (even verbal) on a Jewish person or property in the two years prior to the panic-mongering by community representatives.
The term “denier” itself is interesting. It’s a good example of linguistic territorialism. The term has traditionally referred to Holocaust deniers. So when the JC headlines “Deniers…” it can be assured that many of its readers’ first reaction will be to think that it is Holocaust deniers that are being referred to. Some will read no further. Others will and will learn that the subject is not Holocaust deniers but those to question the extent of anti-Semitism in the Party. (A similar but more subtle thing goes on with the use of Dayenu as Enough is Enough.)
Sorry…something I forgot to say.
I was shocked to find that a fellow CLP member with whom I work closely and who knows I am Jewish retweeted some nonsense about the Rothschilds and a post suggesting Israeli collusion in 9/11. A clear case of anti-Semitism, David?
Well, I admit I was shocked. So I had a chat with him and that proved even more shocking. He said he didn’t know the Rothschilds were Jewish!
Well, given our good working relations, I believe him. He is young and fiery but has no political education. To him the Rothschilds are bankers and bankers are arch-capitalists. As for the 9/11 retweet he agrees that that was stupid and says that at the time he was ingenously open to all sorts of mad conspiracy theories.
My fellow activist has supported my work in trying to clarify the Jewish-Zionist issue and wondered why the Party locally and nationally didn’t do anything to educate new members, paticularly young ones.
So my disagreement with David is not over whether what my fellow activist retweeted fits an anti-Semitic paradigm, but how to deal with him. Educate, I say, get the person to post an apology on the CLP’s Facebook page, issue a warning and stay vigilant. Don’t expel, don’t even suspend. Deal with the matter locally but report it nationally for information.
Finally, this was all some years ago. No one locally ever noticed there was an anti-Semite in their midst (because there wasn’t). It took some trolls to unearth these long-forgotten retweets and blame the Left for them.
… and Paul …
“And still no detailed analysis of the report’s findings in the Guardian.”
Quelle surprise!
There is a continuity right through this sad piece of history in the co-option of the Guardian by an establishment narrative (since the Edward Snowden affair) when push comes to shove.
I’m temperamentally allergic to conspiracy theories – but has anyone else noticed that the Graun is also deep into scare stories over the Covid-19 epidemic – reflecting the daily official narrative courtesy the Beeb.
Of course, there is stuff to be a bit scared about – but there’s also a lot of contrary and conflicting analysis around that isn’t simply quotidian jabbering on the extreme fringe of the internet. You would think that a newspaper boasting :
” our measured, accurate, independent reporting – in times of crisis and beyond”
.. would be giving some airtime to such balancing analysis and questioning.
But when did you last see the bald fact (for instance – at the most basic level) that the track of 2020 cumulative deaths (the only reasonably reliable indicator) is still running below that of 2017/18 – a bad ‘flu year?
Just asking.