The EHRC Report – critical evaluations / 1

I would like to suggest to any Jewish member of the LP who has been falsely accused of antisemitism, whether explicitly or by insinuation, and who is now thinking of leaving the party, that before taking such a step he/she write to the party formally accusing it of antisemitic harassment by LP functionaries and by those who made the original accusations, and demanding a full enquiry and an apology. If the names of their accusers and the functionaries who dealt with the false accusations are not known, a demand should be made that they be revealed. This will help to set the record straight concerning the nature of the malicious political nature of the false accusations.

According to the EHRC report, any such charge must be dealt with according to the MacPherson principle, which compels the LP to treat the matter seriously. Furthermore, despite the gross shortcomings of the EHRC report, pp 58 – 72 do at least make clear, in line with the Chakrabarti report, that the LP procedures failed to observe some of the most elementary principles of natural justice, and that this must be rectified.

I do not for one moment wish to minimise the hurt caused to non-Jewish victims of such false accusations. Unfortunately however, owing to the Macpherson principle, Jewish victims are in a better position to combat and expose the nature of this particular McCarthyite campaign than others, because requiring or expecting Jews to hold Zionist political beliefs is a clear instance of antisemitism. For this reason I believe that Jewish opponents of apartheid who have been vilified can perform a great service to the people of this country by exposing this monstrous political charlatanry to the light of day.

For the tip of this particular iceberg, systematically ignored by the corporate media, see
https://jewishvoiceforliberation.org.uk/article/the-wrong-sort-of-jew-how-labour-pursued-complaints-against-elderly-jewish-opponents-of-israel/
The EHRC report is at
https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/investigation-into-antisemitism-in-the-labour-party.pdf

It is coming to something when dyed-in-the-wool conservative journalists are critical of the report and standing by Corbyn. Let us be honest: there has been an organized political and personal assassination of a thoroughly decent, honest and trustworthy MP who gave us in the Party hope for a better future. I quote Miriam Margolyes: “Jeremy Corbyn is a man of principle”

Excellent assessment. So it IS a stitch-up! As anticipated! I hope Jeremy is consulting with his lawyers. There was just over £333,000 in the kitty the last time I checked.

We should all be writing letters en masse to local and regional newspapers pointing out the short-comings in the report, if one can call them that, because like so many things relating to Jeremy, it’s all spun – however thinly – to cast him in a negative light.

Well to put it bluntly, it’s totally twisted!

Sanders’ and Oborne’s clear-sighted piece is a refreshing corrective to the reports and comments on most of the mainstream media. They make a comprehensive case against the probity and value of the EHRC report.

And the concluding paragraphs are pretty damning: ‘Starmer clearly believes he has now firmly established his own political identity and laid the foundations for the transformation of Labour’s electoral prospects – in the mould of Kinnock and Blair.

‘It may be that he has simply destroyed his reputation for moral and intellectual integrity – and inflicted a mortal wound on the soul of his party.’

The other thing that interests me very much, from the moment Starmer began his statement on the report on Thursday, is how he was laying a trap for himself (and a number of journalists took this up in questions). He was there on Corbyn’s front bench, he was part of the leadership. What the leadership was held to be responsible for (however unjustly — a separate issue), he, Starmer surely and obviously shares in that responsibility.

If Corbyn is innocent (and he is) of the opportunistic charges against him, then Starmer is too. But Starmer clearly holds Corbyn guilty as (falsely) charged. Questioned on this very point, he tried to wriggle out of any complicity.

He’ll be hounded and haunted for ever on this. I had thought his best contribution would be to bring back some pragmatism while rebuilding trust amongst voters who aren’t ideologically committed to Labour (and the party has to win over those who would usually vote Tory as well as its natural constituency). (I know that another word for ‘pragmatism’ might be ‘sell-out’, but we’ve got to get this destructive Con government out with all that that implies, rightwing press, establishment forces and the rest of it.)

But instead of that, it looks as if Starmer has blown it.

Oborne and Sanders are completely correct in their response. I don’t think Felix Bellaby is entirely right that context, division and transition cannot be part of EHRC deliberation. Any legal deliberation , that has the structure of legality in its remit and the force of law in its conclusions can be challenged .Indeed, this should be challenged in a court of law. Otherwise the events of this week are a travesty that like Blair & Chilcot, will be revisited in history books as monumentally unjust. There has been a travesty also in reporting by journalists who were at the EHRC press briefing. Shame is attached to most of their commentary against Corbyn over 4 years on this issue, particularly in the Guardian, but also all British Media, whose journalists wrote myriad, biased , unevidenced stories and opinion pieces that got many things wrong, inferrred thousands of anti-Semitic posts to Labour that was completely untrue. They gave excessive platforms,and promoted pejorative headlines usupported by fact amounting to hugely imbalanced space and air time given to Corbyn’s opponents and which culminated in the tsunami of vitriol and distortion that was in my view the Panorama programme. George Wilmers is spot on about the actions Jewish members accused of anti-Semitism could do and should do. But bear in mind the harrowing, experiences they have already undergone at the hands of the McNicolites. Some have been driven to self=harm. The pain is dreadful. Do they want to relive it?

David Renton writes:
Labour’s handling of the crisis was not caused, ultimately, by the absence of a policy akin to the Party’s documents on sexual harassment (you could call this the Chakrabarty fallacy) but by the unwillingness of most members to admit that the problem of antisemitism was real.

Renton does not address the possibility that most members have genuinely never experienced nor witnessed antisemitic acts. They do not therefore dispute the existence of some antisemitic acts, but do dispute their prevalence, let alone their constituting a major problem for the party. The patently questionable accounts of ‘whistleblowers’ to the effect that they met antisemitic comments at LP meetings every day may have impressed a willing John Ware, but plainly could not have occurred in those CLPs where daily LP meetings do not happen (ie all of them). LP members should not be blamed, but rather commended, for testing MSM and factional claims which do not accord with their lived reality – a test which the EHRC applies to complainants but never to respondents or to that ‘collective respondent – the LP.’

This rather than the left wing dogmatism Renton attributes to the large majority of members (chance were a fine thing!) should account for the discrepancy between the MSM image and the attitude of most members. Compare the account in Bad News for Labour.