It’s obvious that Labour’s antisemitism problem was overstated 

JVL Introduction

Jeremy Corbyn lost the whip when he said that the scale of Labour’s antisemitism had been overstated.   Now we read that in his inquiry Martin Forde stated that he saw no evidence for this: there is nothing in the Leaked Report (or elsewhere in the evidence we have seen) to support the conclusion that the problems of antisemitism in the Party was overstated.   

As Alan Maddison demonstrates here, Forde’s statement must have been based solely on the content of the Leaked Labour Report and accounts of some HQ staffers regarding in-house exchanges. It is not an overall evaluation.

For Maddison shows that the evidence for overstatements about the scale of Labour antisemitism employed outside of Labour HQ is overwhelming.

It’s obvious that Labour’s antisemitism problem was overstated 

Martin Forde QC made this key statement below on page 21 of his recent report (1), and I found it rather astonishing.

There have indeed been relentless claims of antisemitism becoming widespread in the Labour Party since Jeremy Corbyn became leader. Similar allegations were never leveled at other parties, so this was often presented as an antisemitism problem unique to Labour and sometimes given as a reason not to vote for them.

Yet we have frequently analysed available data (here and here), and though we expect antisemitism to exist in Labour as in society, we never found any credible evidence that it was more prevalent than elsewhere; certainly not that it was widespread. So for me such claims were clearly ‘overstatements’ and they were very common too.

The word ‘overstated’ never appeared in the “The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014-2019”, generally known as the Leaked Labour Report (LLR) that Forde was investigating, but it was the word employed by Jeremy Corbyn in a statement which led to his losing the whip. He said that while it was wrong to claim there was no antisemitism in Labour, its scale had been “dramatically overstated” for political gain.

Forde seems therefore to contradict Corbyn, and to support Starmer who subsequently said there was no such exaggeration.

So is Forde agreeing with Starmer that such claims made repeatedly in the media – such abusive allegations as that the Labour Party was “riddled with anti-Semites“, “infested with Jew hatred”, “a cesspit of antisemitism” (9), or of “Jeremy Corbyn’s anti‑semite army“ – were justified?

Surely not?

The important question is whether the phrase in Forde’s statement in the box above “or elsewhere in the evidence we have seen” was limited to his primary focus, which was the leaked report and HQ exchanges, or whether it also included evidence on the situation in the wider Labour Party as described in submissions he received.

In this article we will explore both possibilities.

The Leaked Labour Report (LLR)

In the LLR the authors say their report revealed the scale of Labour’s antisemitism problem. This related to a total of 1325 antisemitism complaints processed up to the end of 2019 and would have involved a maximum of 0.24% of 550 000 members. Not all of these complaints were upheld.

There is no available data on such manifestations in wider society in order to make a direct comparison, but in a large survey of Britons by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research 5% of respondents were considered as probable antisemites and 30% endorsed at least one anti-Jewish statement.

So, even though we do not expect the 0.24% will identify all those Labour members with antisemitic attitudes, it is way off the expected 5% of antisemites in the general population and provides no support for the claim of a “uniquely widespread Labour antisemitism”.

The LLR authors never suggested that there was a widespread nor unique problem for Labour. On the contrary, they mention only “a small number of members holding views which were unarguably hostile to Jewish people” (LLR p11).

They never made any “overstatement” but rather considered that these complaints reflected prejudices found in wider society (LLR p11-12).

In addition, the LLR authors report that the significant growth in complaints was largely a result of a small group of apparently anti-Corbyn political activists, often not Jewish, conducting intensive retrospective trawls of probable Labour members. They were searching for posts that could possibly reflect antisemitism, most of those found initially concerned Israel. Not all involved Labour members and many did not provide credible evidence. They were then leaking their complaint submissions to the media, usually with inflated numbers. In essence we see in the LLR that the growth in complaints was driven mostly by increased politically-motivated online scrutiny, rather than offline incidents reported by Jewish victims. We learn that just one of these trawlers submitted around half of the complaints received (LLR p843).

It sounds therefore reasonable that Forde found no evidence for any overstatements from the LLR authors, but what did he mean by expanding this to “elsewhere in the evidence we have seen”?

Interactions “elsewhere” within Labour HQ

In his foreword (p6) Forde describes the interactions between Left and Right HQ factions beginning with this paragraph;

The impression given by this statement is that typical exchanges involved some on the Left often dismissing antisemitism issues as exaggerated, usually when raised in a reasonable manner by the Right.

This appears disconnected from the exaggerations Labour members were facing from the Right in the outside world and trumpeted in the mass media. Staffers on both sides must have been very aware of this during their exchanges, as were the authors of the LLR.

Let’s explore what was going on outside.

Interactions outside Labour HQ

Daniel Finn political editor of the Jacobin described what was happening outside well:

“So let’s be clear. The charge against Corbyn’s Labour Party is not that some party members have expressed antisemitic views, or that internal disciplinary procedures are not up to scratch, or that the leadership itself has been guilty of some failings on the issue.

Measured, proportional criticism of that kind is not a “smear,” and the vast majority of Corbyn supporters would have responded to it in good faith, if that was the main thrust of the argument.

Instead, they have been bombarded with hysterical claims that Labour under Corbyn is “a cold house for Jews,” “riddled with antisemitism from top to bottom”. It is said to have become a party “for the many, not the Jew,” with a leader who winks approvingly at bullies and bigots.

That is the smear, propagated tirelessly by a wide range of political actors united by their hostility to Corbyn’s project.”

So the background to what was going on in HQ is that the trigger to disagreements outside HQ was indeed exaggerated claims about the scale of Labour antisemitism.

Exaggerations were frequent and often offensive

Here we have some examples of ‘overstated’ allegations from a range of media publications between 2016 and 2019.

The allegations in Table 1 could only be based on evidence from published complaints so were clearly “overstatements” of the very small minority of Labour members involved.

The fact that such overstatements were frequent is confirmed by the need for the authors of two formal inquiries to make related conclusions,

In June 2016 The Shami Chakrabarti Inquiry reported that the “Labour Party is not overrun by antisemitism” as had obviously been claimed.

Then in October 2016 a cross-party Home Affairs Committee reported on their inquiry into Antisemitism in the UK and concluded:

The statements from both inquiries demonstrate explicitly that exaggerated allegations of a uniquely widespread Labour antisemitism were not only frequent but unfounded.

The findings of these two inquiries in 2016 still stand today. As previously mentioned, Jamie Stern-Weiner and I have recently reviewed all the recent published evidence we could find. This included inquiries, surveys, views of Labour members and antisemitism complaints. We never found any convincing evidence that antisemitism was widespread in Labour’s ranks, nor more prevalent than in other political parties or in the wider society. In fact, the indirect evidence suggested it should have been less prevalent.

More serious manifestations of antisemitism were overstated too

In 2018 the journalist James O’Brien tweeted that ‘Labour is the Party of Holocaust deniers…’

…and he obtained over 5 000 likes.

O’Brien appears to be saying that Labour members displayed Holocaust denial at a level much higher that that found in other parties or wider society.

Is there really any evidence for this assertion?

A survey undertaken by the Holocaust Memorial Trust, reported here (p95) indicated that a worrying 5% of the British respondents believed that the Nazi Holocaust never happened.

Above we have applied this 5% to the total British population and to a representative sample of 550 000 which is what one could expect if Labour Party members had the same views on this as the rest of society.

We have added 29 cases of Holocaust denial reported in the LLR between 2017 and 2019. It is not possible to move from manifestations of Holocaust denial to clear figures of how many hold such beliefs yet do not act on them. But a survey conducted by the World Jewish Congress into manifestations of Holocaust denial on social media may help. According to their UK data set we could expect 228 cases of Holocaust denial per 550 000 Britons using social media over this time period. We have 29: clearly this is of concern in its own right but nothing to justify O’Brien’s singling out of the Labour Party when we might expect such beliefs to be held by 5% of the members and expressed by an estimated 228.

Exaggerated prevalence of far-left antisemitism

Prior to Corbyn’s arrival there had been fewer than 50 complaints about antisemitism in the Party. Is the fact that this grew more than 20-fold to 1325 in 2019 proof of Corbyn’s Labour antisemitism problem?

Membership growth was less than three-fold in the period, so only a small part of this increase can be explained by that.

This opened the way for some to claim it was due to an influx of large numbers of far left, Corbyn-supporting, antisemites into the Party.

Joan Ryan, ex-Labour MP and once chair of Labour Friends of Israel, had said that the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn had become “infected with the scourge of anti-Jewish racism. This problem simply did not exist in the party before his election as leader.”

In the Jewish Chronicle in 2016 we read that Corbyn’s Labour is “A party that attracts antisemites like flies to a cesspit”.

But such assertions often assume greater prevalence of antisemitism on the far left than elsewhere in society and the evidence we have contradicts this view.

In their 2017 survey the Institute for Jewish Policy Research found that antisemites were no more common amongst very left-wingers than in the general population.

A later 2019 survey for the Campaign Against Antisemitism group, revealed a similar pattern for anti-Jewish attitudes across the political spectrum (Figure 1).

Those supporters of Jeremy Corbyn who were very left-wing (not all were) had one of the lowest antisemitism indices (0.44).

So this “influx of far left antisemites” explanation is wrong and clearly another “overstatement”.

The impact of repeated ‘overstatements’ on voter perceptions

In 2019 a survey a team measured the impact of misleading media coverage of Labour antisemitism. In addition to ‘the scale of Labour antisemitism being repeatedly distorted and “overstated’, the media spotlight being maintained on Labour and antisemitism convinced the public that there must have been a big problem, not apparent in other political parties, nor for other minority groups.

Members of the public on average thought that 34% of Labour members had faced investigations for complaints of antisemitism.

In Figure 2 below I have updated the ‘reality’ with complaint data from the LLR (11). This illustrates the scale of the indisputable impact of repeated misinformation on public perceptions.

You could reasonably conclude that if only 0.24% in red was the reality around that time, the remaining 33.76% in blue represents pure exaggeration. Put another way voter perception overstated the reality more than 140-fold!

Conclusion

Outside Labour HQ the evidence for dramatic overstatement or exaggeration of Labour antisemitism is indisputable. We see in this article that it is well documented across a wide set of parameters, even with a measure of the impact on voter perceptions.

This strongly suggests that Forde’s statement about “seeing no evidence for overstatements” was restricted to accounts he was given on exchanges inside Labour Party HQ.

In other words, Forde does not contradict Jeremy Corbyn who was totally justified in his “overstatement” comment, and Keir Starmer was clearly wrong.

Was it insensitive of Corbyn to state the truth, as Angela Rayner described it? I think not.

Look at the words chosen for such exaggerations in Table 1, often by anti-Corbyn Jewish groups. Eliane Glaser, a Jewish historian, observed that these words echo those used to dehumanise Jews before the genocide of the Nazi Holocaust.

Jeremy Corbyn and Labour members feeling unjustly accused must be allowed to exercise their right to free speech to defend their honour. To pretend that most Jewish people might be offended if the truth were told is extraordinary. It is the gross exaggerations or (overstatements) that generated hurt and fear. Just as Labour members are being deeply hurt by the same demonising lies designed to discredit them.

So yes, there is plenty of evidence that Labour antisemitism was “dramatically overstated”, often with unacceptable and abusive language. Jeremy Corbyn and Labour members have the right and the duty to expose this reality.

Dr Alan Maddison
17 September 2022