The Labour Party: the gift that keeps on giving

Tony Booth, JVL’s Environment Officer, writes

In February 2024 I received a letter from the Labour Party to say my suspension was ended. This was a couple of months after I had received a new membership card.

However, I had left the Party in July 2022, when I stopped my subscription, because of the disrespect I and others had been shown through the complaints process and my dislike of the Party’s dishonesty, curbing of democracy and rightward lurch.

My communications with the Party did not conceal my disgust at my poor treatment.

My readmittance to the Party suggests no one within the Party’s Governance and Legal Unit read them.

As Safeguarding Officer for his Constituency Labour Party, I had written a motion of no confidence in regional staff because of their malign influence and because of allegations in the Leaked Report on Labour’s Governance and Legal Unit that they had insulted party members, including black MP, Clive Lewis.

Here is the fuller story

I left the Labour Party at the end of July 2022, when I stopped my direct debit shortly after I received, an absurdly delayed Notice of Investigation into my suspension in January 2021.  As Cambridge Labour Party Safeguarding Officer, I had written a motion of no confidence in Eastern Regional Staff, who appeared to encourage discriminatory selection procedures and were alleged, in the leaked report into “The Work Of The Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit (GLU)”, to have abused comrades. This included calling Clive Lewis MP “the biggest C*** of the lot”. I was accused of making a derogatory remark for pointing out this and other statements and was summarily suspended.

Come back all is almost forgiven.

Imagine my surprise when I received a new membership card for the Labour Party in November 2023, the one with the fragmented Union Jack towards its hard right edge on one side and a populist nationalistic pledge on the other to be “Putting the country first”. I saw the sending of the card as a blip in a malfunctioning bureaucracy. However, it was followed on February 21st, 2024, with an email telling me I had been readmitted to the Labour Party since I had “served more than two years of suspension” for my misdemeanour, provided I heeded a “formal warning as to my future conduct”.

I had not sent a formal resignation email in 2022 because I was convinced that this would be ignored as had my previous attempts at communication. I think the inbox on the Governance and Legal Unit computer, is opened sporadically, only to delete its contents. I do not believe there has ever been any intention to communicate in a civil way with those accused by the Party.  In a decent organisation this would result in multiple dismissals. It is laughable that Labour’s disciplinary processes were given a clean bill of health in 2023 following inspection from the Equality and Human Rights Commission. This reinforces doubts about the competence and good faith of this body too.  However, humour about Labour’s disciplinary processes can only be black given the upset that has been caused to those whose guilt is assumed from the moment they are accused, in an inversion of much heralded, British justice.

Keeping my distance

The letter that I sent in July 2022 refusing to respond to my Notice of Investigation, set out for my own record, my contempt for the behaviour of Party officials. Had it been read, it is highly improbable that I would later be invited back into the fold:

Dear Governance and Legal Unit,

I cannot tell if a qualified or competent person has sent this email to me, since it is not signed by a named person and so it is difficult for me to check. It may be that whoever pressed send on the email is blissfully unaware of how rude and inconsiderate a message it is, blatantly breaching my rights as a member of the Party as set out in Chapter 2 of our 2022 Rule Book, clause II:

Members have the right to dignity and respect, and to be treated fairly by the Labour Party. Party officers at every level shall exercise their powers in good faith and use their best endeavours to ensure procedural fairness for members.

Is it incompetence or rudeness which has meant that this recent communication makes no mention of the detailed letter I wrote on 25^th January 2021, in response to my original suspension of the 14^th January of that year, or of the letter I wrote on the 18^th March when I had received no reply to the first letter? Now more than eighteen months after my suspension any commitment by the GLU to acting in good faith or with procedural fairness has been entirely trashed. I attach my original letters; in case your system has no means of tracking our previous correspondence.

I have no intention of responding to the allegations you made against me until I have an apology from a named responsible person for the way the GLU has conducted its relationship with me over my suspension, and I have received a detailed reply to my letter of January 2021…

…There is certainly no recognition of the irony in an accusation from you that I made derogatory remarks against regional staff because I asked for their alleged derogatory remarks against party members to be investigated. If the claim that someone has made a derogatory remark amounts itself to a derogatory remark, then the GLU would need to investigate its own behaviour in drawing up this Notice of Investigation.

Please let me know by return, that you intend to honour my requests for an apology and a reply to earlier correspondence.

I certainly do not see myself bound in any way by your attempt to stifle my right to publicise your appalling behaviour up to this point.

Needless to say, I received no response to this letter.

The beginning of the end

My suspension on 14th January 2021 had happened the morning after I sent my no confidence motion to the secretary of Trumpington Branch in Cambridge, who happened to be my partner, Sue Buckingham. Sue circulated it to Branch members, but I was suspended before I could attend a meeting to discuss it. Someone within the Branch must have made a complaint to the regional office who acted almost immediately to suspend me, ignoring an obvious conflict of interests. It was astonishing how rapidly a system, so constipated at most other times, could operate when the opportunity arose to purge someone on the left. I had suspected that I was on the hit list of the right-wing mob who had regained ascendancy in the Party locally after Jeremy Corbyn’s resignation.  An extract from the letter I sent following my suspension, takes up the story:

I wrote my motion because I was concerned that my CLP was taking advice from Regional Staff who might be pursuing factional interests as indicated in the leaked report into the Governance and Legal Unit. As Safeguarding Officer I raised concern at our CLP Executive Committee about a selection procedure for Councillor candidates which seemed to involve intimidation towards one candidate, trying to scare him about the content of his social media without mentioning anything specific. I complained to the chair of our CLP who sought advice from the Region and received an email back appearing to justify factional and discriminatory behaviour towards candidates.

I knew this candidate well, as someone on the left of the Party whose twitter feed contained relatively mild criticisms of Israel. It worried me that this discriminatory tactic worked to put off a comrade on the left from standing for election as a councillor. He was extremely upset by the experience and felt that an appeal, which I offered to support, would be too anxiety-provoking for him and his family. My letter continued:

I checked whether the staff member giving this advice had been named in the leaked Governance report and found that this was not the case, unlike two other prominent members of the Regional Office. I append redacted screen shots of the alleged remarks made by staff who now hold the posts of Regional Director and Deputy Regional Director, BB and AA. AA was said to call Clive Lewis “the biggest c*** of the lot”, and also agreed that a senior member of central staff in the GLU, CC, would “hang back on suspensions”. I suspect that this was in the context of suspensions for allegations of antisemitism. AA seemed to suggest that bullying people was a good strategy, saying that he liked “to go round threatening people as I see fit”. Both he and BB, appeared to hope for a bad performance from the Party in elections under Jeremy Corbyn who one of them called an “aged trot” and that as a result of such failure his supporters will “lapse there (sic) membership”.

I had been worried for some time about the lack of progress the Party was making in responding to allegations in the leaked report. How are members meant to feel safe or have confidence in the advice and decisions of staff against whom such allegations have been made?

I said that my letter of suspension “reminded me of the ‘hostile environment’ documents sent to a refugee family whose application for asylum I was supporting. I commented on the lack of “support offered by the Party for those suspended.” If I was “troubled by the letter, I should seek medical help or phone the Samaritans.” I referred to the chilling case of Carl Sargeant who killed himself during a brutally handled, slow investigation into a complaint about him and commented: “I do not see the radical change in the complaints process which is needed to lessen the chance of this happening again.”

I pointed out, that as a Jew, I did not feel safe in Starmer’s Labour Party:

I have not felt safe in the Party of late since it seems that Jews like me, on the left of the Party, have come under particular attack, as evidenced by the disproportionate number of us that have been suspended. I fear that some people are taking delight in getting another Jew suspended especially one to whom they can affix the racist label: “the wrong sort of Jew”. I was particularly shocked by the suggestion from our General Secretary that various issues should not be discussed in the Party because this might make Jews feel unwelcome. This had the opposite effect on a number of Jews that I know since we feel that we are being used as pawns in the factional moves of the Party leadership to curb democracy and the free expressions of members, particularly comrades on the left of the Party. This is antisemitic.

Exoneration by the Forde Report?

At the same time as I received my notice of investigation in July 2022 Martin Forde, finally published the investigation into the leaked report initiated more than two years earlier. He found that by and large it was an accurate record of what Labour Party staff had said. So, given that my actions as Safeguarding Officer were justified by the Forde Report’s findings, I should have been exonerated and action should have been taken by the Labour Party against the bullying, hate-speech and corrupt campaigning of some paid officials.

This did not happen since their faction was firmly in charge under Starmer, who allowed the recommendations of the report to wither.  For me, the most telling couple of sentences in the whole report appear in the Forward where Martin Forde tells how some of those named in the Leaked Report tried to prevent his work:

I started to receive emails…and lawyers’ letters threatening me and other Panel Members with legal action if we examined data referred to in it. (page 3)

This was missed entirely by the press, but it is unlikely that it was unknown to the Labour leadership who had already paid out money to the same officials whose integrity had been questioned, despite legal advice that this was not necessary. The creation of the investigation was a familiar charade.

Reshaping my activism. 

Between 2015 and 2019, I put in thousands of hours working for the election of a Labour Government. Much unnecessary time was expended trying to overcome the kind of factionalism that had greeted me when I returned to Labour.  At the first General Meeting, as I rose to speak for the first time, the paid Labour official shrieked at me, his face contorted: “fucking sit down”. When the Chair of the City Council, Lewis Herbert, referred to the Lib Dem Councillors as the spawn of Satan, I called for “a gentler kinder politics”. I was told by a hard-right comrade that they were a family and could speak as they wished. If I didn’t like it, I should “find a different party”.

Things did improve for a while through the efforts of the many socialist comrades who wanted to change the direction of Party policies and culture though never enough to create a lasting legacy.  With Jeremy Corbyn gone and the bullies firmly re-established, divorce from this dysfunctional family seemed a thoroughly life-affirming option.

Before 2015 I had been a member of the Green Party which I saw as considerably more progressive than Blair and Miliband’s Labour Party and the best place for my activism as an eco-socialist. I have returned to that Party armed with the increased local political knowledge I have from political and environmental battles in a Labour controlled area. Starmer’s party is part of the rightwards-veering political scene, around which, as an activist, I have to negotiate.

I continue to stand in solidarity with all those lovely comrades treated disgustingly by the Labour Party.  For many of those suspended or excluded unfairly, the Party was more firmly integrated into their identities than in mine. For some of these it had been at the centre of their lives for more than half a century. The wrench and upset have been huge. I think of Riva Joffe and Mike Howard, Jewish heroes, suspended and falsely accused of antisemitism, who died before the Labour Party system could spit them back out, as damned or saved.

This last period in the Labour Party, and the purge itself, has considerably deepened my understanding of what solidarity means. It has coincided with the building of new networks across Party divides, working together on common imperatives: resisting the war on Nature, economic and social justice, the liberation of Palestine.