The Forde Report is vital to the future of the Labour Party: so why has there been silence?
John McDonnell MP with Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi & Miriam David led a JVL members’ workshop on the Forde Report. The workshop explored the recent Report and how it undermined the dominant narrative of a Labour Party over-run with antisemitism. The speakers described how Jews and others who defend Palestinian rights were unfairly disciplined by the Party. They explained how the report showed this focus on equating Jews with Israel and inaccurately labeling criticism of Zionism as antisemitism also penalised black other racialised minority members of the Party because their experiences of discrimination and harassment were given less or no attention. A lively Q&A session teased out many important points about the failures of Labour Party governance and internal democracy.
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Mike Cushman
Please keep fighting against this. Your input on this is particularly pertinent. There was a collusion of interests to remove JC. If in the future the so called British establishment is exposed for what it has done, and is required to redeem itself for it’s behaviour, the use of the Israel / Palestine issue will prove useful to them. They will be able to blame “The Jews” for interference in UK politics. The theory is already there, and this entire episode is already being portrayed as ‘evidence’.
When will people learn that nationalism and racism is the most powerful tool of the sociopaths that we all suffer from?
The weaponisation of anti-semitism was promoted and led by Zionist organisations in UK and funded by a foreign power intent on subverting British Democracy. Why is this not front page news every day?
What Starmer and Evans are doing is the political equivalent of domestic abuse, where the controlling partner isolates the victim from all sources of support and validation and silences their voice.
When there’s such determined, shameless abuse of organisational power and the silencing of reasonable protests about that abuse, victims’ only ways out are to flee or to carefully weaken the abusers’ control.
Understandably, many Labour members have fled. For those determined to stay, I’d suggest they plan and mount a co-ordinated, national campaign in the provincial press explaining the democratic and natural justice deficits within Labour and why it matters to readers that Labour sorts out its messes before the next general election.
The local and regional press is harder for the HQ of any mainstream party to dominate than is the London-based press. Letters to the editor (for safety, under pseudonyms) and features are easier to “sell” because most of the local press NEED free local copy.
I think some initiative of this kind is probably the only one that has a chance of making Starmer and Evans rethink their approach.
The Forde report is vital not only for the Labour Party but also for the integrity of a major political party and democracy in this country.
The Forde Report was described in a song by Joni Mitchell ‘Both Sides Now!’ when it concluded that both sides were ‘equally’ responsile for the factonal in-fighting which divided the Labour Party. The QC decided that ‘both sides’ were equally as bad as each other & by doing so demonstrated how fair, impartial & even handed the Report really was. The problem is that one side still dominates & continues its mission of ‘social cleansing’ & eliminating ‘the wrong type of Jew’ or any Socialists or any dissenting voices. The Forde Report failed to identify the root cause of Fascism in the Labour Party.
Starmer/NEC and Co have at least mentioned the Forde Report but have not to my knowledge even acknowledged the existence of Al-Jazera’s “The Labour Files”. Nor have the national press/TV/Radio investigated the serious allegations and evidence presented therein. Apparently “The Labour Files” are figments of my fevered imagination.
The issue re. the time taken before the Forde Report was published came up during this discussion and whether Forde was used as a delaying tactic. In my opinion, given the ‘reasons’ given for various dates for its publication being missed, it most certainly was a delaying tactic. There’s an old adage “delayed justice is justice denied”: the same applies to delayed revelations made by Forde.
It’s important to recall Labour did not have a press conference after the Forde Report was published, to allow public engagement with it’s findings & recommendations. So unlike when the EHRC report came out, there was no headline grabbing ‘day of shame’ for Labour this time round.
In the frantic race to win power, Labour seems equally unprepared to hear, in light of Forde, voiced concerns coming from some of it’s own MPs, members, and related networks like JVL. This is all very dangerous. Democracy isn’t a handy name tag to sell the Labour Party on, but a verb. It must be enacted or surely the opposite starts to take over. The PLP’s engagement now with the evident depth of feeling about the Forde Report doesn’t necessitate their giving way to every suggestion, but showing the common decency of putting forward a serious response to concerns raised.
Deeply worrying is the thought that while some on the left are valiantly fighting on in the LP, others are falling by the wayside precisely because they experience multiple layers of discrimination and/or express one too many points of dissent from the PLP. For it’s abundantly obvious the Labour Leadership have long been prepared to forego listening to certain voices in order to get into No 10. Yet look what happens out there in Britain to those whose voices are likewise silenced, no matter how much they spoke up: To the people in Grenfell Tower? To the family of Awaab Ishak?
So for Labour to treat this published report commissioned by the current Labour Leader, as if politically unimportant, is quite unbelievable! As is Keir Starmer’s apparent failure to meaningfully address concerns expressed to him about its findings.
I am glad not to be a Labour Part member because it increasingly resembles a wayward organisation which wantonly expels long-standing members legitimately campaigning for human rights, particularly for Palestinians, branding them antisemitic and racist arbitrarily. I left the Party over the Iraq War which I consider one of the most egregious acts of geopolitical destabilization initiated because of dislike of Sadam Hussein, intending to remove him from power. This breached international law. I was not satisfied the Party showed adequate signs of remorse and, since I am concerned that Palestinians are not treated fairly, I would probably be in line for expulsion from the Party which appears to condone Israel’s persecution of Palestinians.