A triple outrage: Starmer and the EHRC

Introduction

For a lawyer constantly praised for his forensic attention to detail, Keir Starmer’s final statement as outgoing Prime Minister that Labour was “found to be institutionally antisemitic” is an extraordinary travesty of the truth as our statement below makes clear.

Jeremy Corbyn met the publication of the EHRC Report by saying that while trusting that its recommendations would be swiftly implemented “the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media”.

It is a judgment that JVL endorsed and still abides by.

The EHRC investigation into antisemitism and the Labour Party was flawed in a substantial number of ways as we made clear at the time in, for example “The shortcomings of the EHRC Report” posted in November 2020 and our subsequent elaboration in the Verso e-book How the EHRC Got It So Wrong: Antisemitism and the Labour Party, May 2021.

We urge Andy Burnham as prime minister to have no truck with such distortions but to pursue a non-partisan anti-racist policy that is grounded in evidence and informed by universal human rights principles.

RK

A triple outrage: Starmer and the EHRC – A JVL statement

During his final Prime Minister’s Questions last Wednesday, Sir Keir Starmer claimed that he had ‘picked up’ the Labour Party and ‘turned it around’ after the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) had found it ‘to be institutionally antisemitic’.

Starmer’s comments were triply outrageous:

First, the EHRC did not make any finding of ‘institutional antisemitism’. That term is not defined in law and does not appear in the EHRC’s report. The phrase conjures an organisation in which antisemitic speech and conduct are pervasive and which directly discriminates against Jewish people. Submissions to the EHRC did level these allegations against the Labour Party, but the EHRC did not uphold them.

Second, the EHRC’s actual, far more limited findings relied upon serious misrepresentations of both the facts and the law. This has been set out in detail elsewhere by JVL as well as the investigative journalist Paul Holden. The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn mounted a robust defence, but Holden reports that after Starmer became leader, he withdrew the party’s objections and thereby allowed the EHRC’s flimsy indictment to stand unchallenged.

Third, Starmer himself reportedly engaged in the very behaviour the EHRC had condemned. Multiple accounts relate that Starmer was personally involved in the decision to suspend Corbyn over his response to the EHRC report. This arguably amounts to ‘political interference’ in disciplinary cases of the kind that, according to the EHRC, unlawfully discriminates against Jews.

Put otherwise: Starmer colluded in the production of a flawed report on antisemitism, then violated this same report, and then flagrantly misrepresented it—all as part of an apparent effort to traduce his factional opponents.

We deplore Starmer’s misrepresentation of the EHRC report, we denounce the political weaponisation of the fight against antisemitism, and we endorse Peter Oborne’s measured verdict on Starmer’s exit from British political life: ‘Good riddance.’