The EHRC has spoken – Labour is no place for left wing Jews
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has today given Keir Starmer’s Labour Party a clean bill of health regarding the “Action Plan for Driving out Antisemitism” it devised following an EHRC report in October 2020. JVL is still raising concerns about the Action Plan and particularly poor treatement up to and including bullying of Jewish people. If you can support us with a donation to our Crowdfunder, that would be very helpful.
Here is JVL’s statement in response to the EHRC’s decision.
Jewish Voice for Labour, the EHRC and the Labour Party
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) considers that the Labour Party’s Action Plan on antisemitism has been satisfactorily delivered.
This news is alarming. Jews like us do not feel safe in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
Since mid-2021, Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) has repeatedly alerted the EHRC to the disproportionate targeting of Jewish members of the Labour Party for disciplinary action over allegations of antisemitism.
Ironically, this targeting of Jews seems to be reinforcing the claim for the success of the action plan in the name of combating antisemitism.
We received responses from the EHRC but no indication that our reports made any difference to Labour’s implementation or EHRC monitoring of the Action Plan.
Our most recent letter of 8 February 2023 referred the EHRC to the latest statistics on Jews targeted under Labour’s disciplinary procedures.
JVL is currently aware of fully 60 Jewish Labour Party members targeted.
We estimate that:
- A full, Jewish member of JVL is at least 37 times more likely to be investigated for antisemitism than an average Labour Party member.
- A full, Jewish member of JVL is 54 times more likely to be expelled than an average Labour Party member.
- A full, Jewish member of JVL is 63 times more likely to be auto-excluded (i.e., expelled for supporting a proscribed group) than an average Labour Party member.
- A JVL Executive Committee member is 462 times more likely to be auto-excluded (i.e., expelled for supporting a proscribed group) than an average Labour Party member.
The campaign against JVL has been relentless. Notably, in 2022, during the Jewish festival of Chanukah, three prominent Jewish members of JVL were expelled from the Party.
These were Naomi Wimborne Idrissi, a JVL Executive Officer, who was thereby prevented from taking up her elected post as the only Jewish member on Labour’s National Executive Committee. Stephen Marks, who had been a prominent voice on Labour’s National Constitution Committee. And Heather Mendick, who worked in Labour’s leadership office in 2019.
More broadly, Jewish members investigated or sanctioned over antisemitism find the experience profoundly oppressive. Indeed, it feels much like antisemitism itself; we feel hated.
Jewish members have been accused on two main counts. First, for challenging the way the Party interprets and purports to eradicate ‘antisemitism’. Second, for criticising the political ideology of Zionism or the State of Israel. But Jews have long disagreed with each other on these points.
It is abhorrent for the Labour Party to effectively designate progressive or socialist Jewish political traditions as antisemitic, with the EHRC’s apparent stamp of approval.
In some Labour Party constituencies, the situation has deteriorated to the point where Jews who do not support Israel or who continue to support former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn have become too frightened to attend Party meetings for fear of intimidation and abuse.
Worse, they believe that such intimidation and abuse will go unchallenged. What’s worse still, this belief is justified. JVL has reported to the EHRC that not a single Jewish JVL member who has complained of antisemitism directed against them has had their complaint upheld.
In JVL’s most recent letter to the EHRC, our lawyers wrote (added bold):
Our client does not consider that it has received an adequate response in relation to the claims of bullying made on behalf of Mrs Neslen or the letter sent on 23 December 2022 in relation to the Party’s treatment of Stephen Marks. Our client’s experience is that the Party has not provided an adequate channel for members to express their dissatisfaction even in cases of serious distress. Our client therefore seeks confirmation that the EHRC is taking these members’ mistreatment by the Party into consideration as part of its monitoring processes.
Already in 2020, a dozen Jewish Labour members subject to disciplinary proceeding over antisemitism decried Labour’s ‘discrimination against Jewish socialists’. In its May 2021 analysis of the EHRC Report, JVL warned of its ‘pernicious implications for freedom of expression’ in the Labour Party and predicted it would embolden those set on stifling dissent. It is deeply regrettable that these concerns have been borne out.
This is just one component in the tide of disinformation to which the UK has been subjected over alleged antisemitism. At the heart of the problem is a biased news media, including the BBC which we ourselves fund through our licence fees. If you haven’t already done so, please read CAMPAIN’s Open Letter to the Director General of the BBC, see https://www.campain.org/open-letter-from-bbc-subscribers. Please consider signing the form at the top, joining over 1,000 people who have already done so.
I understand why you’ve done this but it looks daft to use percentages about the targeting of JVL members as the overall number of disciplinary actions is not big (“A JVL Executive Committee member is 462 times more likely to be auto-excluded”).
This is a qualitative issue – the expulsion of dissenting political views particularly about Israel but broadly about socialism.
The quantitative analysis on the prevalence of antisemitism has been been mentioned many times and the point of course is that it disposes of antisemitism as an issue. Sadly most of the soft left commentators such as Owen Jones and George Monbiot are incapable or unwilling to separate real but very small antisemitism in Labour from the massive weaponisation of fake antisemitism against the left.
It’s clear to me the EHRC, in ignoring the evidence of JVL, is not fit for purpose. They’ve effectively given the green light to Labour to continue its attacks. Maybe it’s time to leave this hostile environment?
Is it time for JVL to change its name? We are not Jews for Starmer’s Labour, we are Jews for socialism.
Agree with Kenny’s comment above. Jewish Voice for Labour no longer fits. JVSL? Jewish Voice for Socialism in Labour.
The BBC R4 Today Programme reporting about EHRC and Corbyn this morning was despicable. It was intertwined with similarly evidence free assertions about the Chinese threat to Britain. My immediate thought was that the country that would be celebrating today about the success of its interference in UK politics was most likely not China.
I turned off the radio in disgust and looked at the newspapers instead. Starmer announcing in the Times that left wingers could leave the Labour Party if they didn’t like his direction and confirming that Corbyn would not be a Labour Party candidate at the next election. Then a scoop in the Guardian about an Israeli company intervening in 33 presidential level elections around the world, in 27 of which they had achieved the desired results.
Something is very, very rotten in the state of ……..
Response to Kenny Fryde: it may seem like ‘Starmer’s Labour’ to some people, but the Party does not belong to any one individual. It belongs to the whole membership. It is the membership which must – and can – decide whether the Party moves away from, or towards, socialism.
“I find politics difficult to understand.”
My Uncle Barney said.
I agree with him.
“Keir Starmer’s confirmation today that Corbyn cannot stand as a Labour candidate at the next general election”
I thought the leadership of the Labour party are excluded from the disciplinary process and this was endorsed by the Equal rights report.
How can the membership allow Starmer to over ride this democratic process?
I’m furious with Margaret Hodge’s “Lordy” presentation of “facts” this morning. Was there any chance offered for a reply? Tomorrow?
I’m an associate member, but would like to underline dave’s final comment re. “the massive weaponisation of fake antisemitism against the left.”
It’s all so undemocratic and worrying that the true facts are being twisted to suit some people’s agendas and Corbyn is being used and smeared to support a dialogue that suits certain people that is not showing the actual facts.Some in the media it seems are not interested in providing or questioning the other voice showing the other side so we the public can see and hear both.
Is this what the Labour Party is all about?
Starmer is already loathed by the significant number of ordinary people who think Palestinians deserve rights and suffer massive racist smearing. If he is really concerned about anti-Semitism he should be concerned that disgust and loathing directed at him – that he has earned – will end up being directed at Jewish people who have not earned it. But being the loathsome man he is, he is most likely satisfied and actually quite pleased that his enemies can be conveniently conflated with some of the most evil people in history. It works for him.
JVL needs to start discussing it’s relationship with the Labour Party. There is never again any prospect of a leader with politics anywhere near Corbyn’s politics being elected. The party cannot be reformed and is not a vehicle for socialism. Resignation by a few hundred Jews and a call by JVL for a new, socialist party may have some impact.
The problem with the approach to the EHRC is that you treat is as a neutral body. It isn’t. It uses racism as a weapon to demonise and attack the left. Why do you think a far-right Commissioner Alistair Henderson was employed to draw up the initial ‘antisemitism’ report? He was a fan of Roger Scruton for god’s sake.
Why do you think the EHRC has deliberately ignored Islamaphobia in the Tory Party. You are devoting an inordinate amount of time to a body whose purposes are not anti-racist. Its board is stuffed now with Tory appointees. Its first CEO Trevor Philips was an acknowledged islamaphobe.
The approach of saying antisemitism in the LP was x or y% misses the point. There was NO antisemitism phenomenon. It was got up. And it is the failure of Corbyn and the Labour Left to understand this simple fact which allows Starmer to continue to deploy this weapon
So, Jeremy Corbyn will not to be allowed to stand as a Labour MP at the next election. This marks a decisive break for the socialists in the Labour Party who were inspired by Corbyn’s politics and promise of transformational change. The expulsion of an internationally recognised life-long anti-racist and peace campaigner, twice democratically elected as Leader by an overwhelming majority of members and trade unionists, is unprecedented and outrageous, even within the turbulent history of Labour politics.
That this should be confirmed using the veil of the EHRC’s approval of changes to the Party’s disciplinary processes is no surprise, for as Martin Forde, KC, authoritatively demonstrated, antisemitism has been weaponised for factional gain. And what a gain it has been. Misinformation about Labour ‘antisemitism’ has been produced and reproduced on an industrial scale. Thousands of words of newsprint, hours of reporting, books, plays, have repeated the woefully exaggerated claim that Labour was ‘overrun’ by ‘Jew hatred’ when Jeremy Corbyn was elected to lead it, so much so that it now holds the status of ‘truth’. That this ‘truth’ has been effectively debunked by some brave investigative journalists and respected academics has escaped serious attention. Dozens of Jewish and non-Jewish Party members, who support Corbyn and his politics, have wrongly been investigated, suspended or even expelled. A few have suffered reputational and material damage and most have been hurt. Even a Holocaust survivor has not escaped this vicious authoritarianism. But much worse still, the hard fought for changes in Party policy to support the human rights of cruelly oppressed Palestinians are being ignored. How can this be a fair, just or decent ‘direction of travel’?
Among the tweets responding to complaints about the targeting of anti-Zionist Jews is the assertion that these 60 or so Jews are not suspended/investigated/expelled because they are Jews but because they have infringed specific rules of behavior. Though superficially plausible, the assertion misses the point. The rules they are said to have infringed are for the most part trivial ones, of the sort that no member useful to Starmer’s project would ever be accused of. Essentially their infringement amounts to being critical of Israel. Starmer supports Israel 100% – ‘no ifs, no buts’. He denies that the term ‘apartheid’ is valid; he meets with the racist Israeli Ambassador to the UK on friendly terms; he will not even move himself to comment on Israel’s transition under its new government to something like full-blown fascism. For this reason anti-Zionist Jews in particular pose a threat to his project to make Labour a safe place for Zionists and Tory entrants: being Jewish themselves they make the point that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism more strongly than any non-Jewish member can. To pit it bluntly, they are targeted precisely because they are Jewish – Jewish but the wrong sort of Jew, the anti-Zionist sort. They set a bad example, and for that reason they must be banished from Starmer’s ‘broad church’, which is, it has to be assumed, too fragile to include them.
May I draw your attention to the Left Legal Fighting Fund, which is actively working to challenge the ‘findings’ of the EHRC. Please support and donate.
Perhaps the expelled JVL members should mount a formal complaint of antisemitism against the Labour Party
I have been silent recently, but now since the statement by Keir Starmer that “Jeremy Corbyn will not be allowed to stand as a Labour Candidate.” I feel, as I felt this situation was inevitable, that without a change of Labour Leadership that a split is also inevitable in the Labour Party. This morning I received an email from Momentum stating the position of the Chair and Co Chair in the matter of Labour’s leadership position and the feeling that Left Wing Members are being forced out. My position is that if we are not welcome then we do not take part in whatever the unwelcoming organisation is. Including our financial support. Without the support there can be no activity of any kind in any sphere of life, including politics. I Urge JVL to research members, associate members, and supporters, to ascertain their feelings on the party and where their support lays in the face of the position the leadership of the party and his followers. My feeling is that the party has been hijacked and it is no longer a democratic organisation that supports the working class. My membership of the Labour Party expired and was not renewed, neither will it be renewed. My support goes to JVL and I shall consider my position as far as any new party that is formed and its invited members. My anger is overcoming my depression at the state of the country and world politics.
It may be that under the Jeremy Corbyn regime the Labour Party didn’t have a recognizable policy for rooting out prejudice against Jews and could rightly be criticised for that.
However, the issue of antisemitism wasn’t a serious problem till Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader with a well-known policy on Israeli human rights abuses. Supporters of Israel were particularly alarmed by the prospect of a voice for Palestinian rights at the heart of government and, in panic, whipped up a storm alleging the Labour Party was substantially an antisemitic organisation with hundreds of antisemitic members. As Corbyn said, the case which was plastered all over the national press, was a gross exaggeration; and the Labour Party lacked the mechanism to correct the claims and deal with the issue. Enter Keir Starmer who wants to appease Israel supporters, no matter what.
It is the membership which must – and can – decide whether the Party moves away from, or towards, socialism.(Hugh Roper).
While I agree with Hugh’s statement, which is I believe a party rule, what Kenny is pointing out is an example of “possession is 9/10ths of the law”. Starmer is capable of changing any rule with which he does not agree. His vindictive treatment of Corbyn and others on the left, and propensity for lies, show dangerous characteristics for someone in a position of power.
Tony (Greenstein) finishes his post by saying the following:
The approach of saying antisemitism in the LP was x or y% misses the point. There was NO antisemitism phenomenon. It was got up. And it is the failure of Corbyn and the Labour Left to understand this simple fact which allows Starmer to continue to deploy this weapon
So just to be clear Tony…. are you saying that if Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left had understood the ‘simple fact’ you mention, then Starmer wouldn’t have been able to continue to deploy this weapon?
So how would that work – or HAVE worked – in practice. Are you saying that JC (and the left) should have been refuting the A/S claims way back and, as such, stating that there is no antisemitism phenomenon to speak of? And would you have had him (and others on the left) say that it was all concocted and contrived from the outset by rabid right-wing fascist forces including Blairites, the corporate media, the Jewish newspapers, the BoD and JLM and CAA and LAA and CST and LFI and the Tory and LibDem leadership to sabotage JCs chances of winning a GE, etc, or something along those lines?
If only JC had done so when he was leader, I’m sure the Sun and the Mail and Express and Telegraph and Guardian et al would have given it front page headline coverage, along with the BBC and all the other news broadcasters. Just like they did when he said that it had been dramatically overstated.
For me, the vicious & unrelenting attacks on Jeremy Corbyn & those in support of him & the policies he espoused; attacks, ostensibly for alleged AntiSemitism, (AS), could be correctly categorised as AS, but not AntiSemitism! It was AntiSocialism! It was a scam … a vile scam that helped to prevent the election of a Labour government, led by Jeremy. I for one, will never, ever forgive them!
These constant attacks on Socialist Jews within the Labour Party, is appalling. Starmer is at the heart of it, as he engages with right wing Zionists, intent on gagging free speech, and destroying Socialist principles. He and they have no place in a party built on genuine Labour values. He is a disgrace!
I.agree with Annie power and Terry Brough I will never forgive Starmer and crew .I will never forgive all those people who lied about Jeremy Corbyn the most honest man I’m Politics . If Starmer getd his way we will be looking at a ticking time Bomb.Since Jeremy stood down the world has gone mad ,it’s a very dangerous world to be in because of leaders like Starmer have projected hate all over our Country .We can not allow this man any power .We have to have a Socialist Party to bring him down .and the EHRC is rigged against the left. Just like the NBC which I have not watched for a few years since they reported all these false allegations.everyone knows they were against Jeremy Corbyn .and isn’t it up to the members of Islington who they want to stand on there behalf .what’s Starmer going to do wipe Islington off the map.
The biggest shame is that the soft left Labour MP`s in Parliament will next be on the agenda for expulsion and harrassment. Before that, anyone in the PLP and wider membership with afiliation to Stop The War are like fish in a barrel. I am an associate member and let my membership laps. It absolutely crucial for JVL to keep making the anti-zionist Jewish voice heard – above the noise of the apartheidist lobby. But, it is at the point now whether the Labour Party is fit for purpose? It is a racist party, with the embers of socialists in it. Why waste valuable time, effort and money, fighting this Authoritarian Racist endeavour?
Thank you for your comment, do please rejoin JVL, the more members and supporters we have the stronger we can be.
The problem is that socialism is now a very dirty word. The right, whether Jewish or not, will use every weapon at its disposal to disarm the left. It suits some labour members to follow this path. Jon Lansman who ran Corbyn’s campaign is Jewish yet he has been remarkably silent. I cannot believe a Jewish person can be accused of anti semitism.