The Forde Report: a way forward despite its hesitancies

The Forde Enquiry was set up on 1st May 2020 to report on the content and circumstances of Labour’s Leaked Report, published a few weeks earlier on 12th April.

The report, entitled “The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014-2019”, was commissioned by then-General Secretary Jennie Formby, an ally of Jeremy Corbyn, during the dying days of his leadership. It was leaked to the press in April 2020 after a decision was made, presumably by the new Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, not to submit it to the EHRC.

The Forde Enquiry was due to report before the end of 2020 but publication was delayed until “early in 2021”, then delayed and delayed again. It finally appeared on 19th July 2022, the hottest day ever recorded in the UK, in the midst of the Tory infighting over the leadership – as good a day as any to bury bad news.

Mainstream media has all but ignored the Report. Those for whom Labour’s so-called antisemitism crisis was a daily spectator sport in which strips could be torn off the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have all gone strangely silent as this graphic by Tom Mills illustrates.

The main coverage has been on the left where it has received careful analysis and criticism; and within the Jewish media which has consistently greeted it with disdain and often with vitriol.

It is a curate’s egg of a Report.

In the Foreword Forde says: “Within minutes of the NEC confirming my appointment, and before I was informed by the Party… I started to receive emails from some of those named in the Leaked Report, and lawyers’ letters threatening me and other Panel members with legal action if we examined data referred to in it.”(p.3)

We can only hope that this threat did not colour the Enquiry’s evaluation of the quite damaging evidence it presents and that the period between submission of the report in March and its publication was not used to try to soften its import.

In any event, the final Report goes to extraordinary lengths to be balanced, “even-handed”, pitting the party machine (HQ) on the one hand against the Corbyn team (LOTO) on the other, two factional sides equally to blame for whatever nefarious deeds took place. The report is filled with formulations blaming both sides equally.

We find this equal blame judgment, deployed time and time again, bizarre in principle. It implies that anyone defending themselves from attack is as guilty as the attacker. It further assumes that the small Corbyn team, coming into office in 2015 against the wishes of a majority of the parliamentary party and the entire party bureaucracy, had equal power, organisational skill, resources, media connections and contacts as the established Labour machine. In reality, the only power it had was a democratic mandate and the enthusiasm of a large majority of grassroots supporters.

The leader elected by the members had a reasonable expectation that the paid staff of the Party would provide him with professional support. The report makes clear that they deliberately refused to do so and adopted a hostile stance. While the LOTO team’s responses may be open to criticism the overwhelming responsibility for the breakdown of relationships lies with HQ staff and the Labour politicians who encouraged them. The Report also puts the same responsibility on political appointees for professional, non-partisan service as on the Party’s civil service.

But despite this presentational “even-handedness”, much of the substance of the Report confirms what we have been saying over the years about the central issues in contention. It is very largely a vindication of what was in the Leaked Report: “there are relatively few examples,” says Forde, “where we think the Leaked Report’s framing is found to be substantially misleading” (Section C: p.26). “In the main, our view is that the messages quoted in the Leaked Report fairly represent the tone and contents of the discussions about Jeremy Corbyn, his staff, and the Party’s Left in the SMT [Senior Management Team] WhatsApp groups and across the selected instant message chats. (p.26) The Report also confirms that the tone and contents were deeply shocking.

Finally, when it comes to education and training, the Report provides a powerful critique of Labour’s current provision.

Some important themes

We will look briefly at four important themes where the noxious behaviour by senior Labour party staff is validated by Forde, and then deal with his very unsatisfactory handling of what should be central: the prevalence of antisemitism.

1. Allegations that the Party machine tried to sabotage the 2017 election campaign.

The Report is unambiguous here:

“Some senior HQ staff had the ability to implement resourcing decisions covertly. A handful of staff in Ergon House created an additional fund for printing costs under code GEL001 (spending some £135,000 in total on campaigns supportive of sitting, largely anti-Corbyn MPs and not on campaigns for pro-Corbyn candidates in potentially Tory winnable seats). (p.62)

“We find that the decision to set up the Ergon House operation covertly and divert money and personnel there without authority of the Campaign Committee, whilst not illegal, departed from the approved strategy; it was as such wrong.” (p.62)

2. The prevalence of discrimination.

Here Forde is harshly critical, concluding that “there are serious problems of discrimination in the operations of the Party”, and pointing specifically that there were

“A significant number of replies to our Call for Evidence – mainly from ordinary Party members – spelling out their experience of discrimination – racism, islamophobia and sexism – in constituency parties and in Party processes.” (p.81)

He elaborates in terms which will be familiar to us all:

“Racism in the Party is not experienced by individuals solely through acts of aggression or microaggression towards them personally – it is experienced through seeing colleagues being passed over for promotion; being the only person from an ethnic minority background around a meeting table; being managed by a near- exclusively white senior team; and hearing the particular disdain which colleagues reserve for (for example) ethnic minority MPs, councillors and CLP members.” (p.81)

3. The accusation that HQ staff weeded Corbyn supporters off the membership and voting lists

The Report says of the “validation exercises” which took place in the run up to the 2015 and 2016 leadership elections:

“In our view the intention and effect of both validation exercises was to remove ballots from individuals who would otherwise have voted for Jeremy Corbyn. It does not seem to us credible to suggest that the exercise (in particular the social media component) was not targeted at applicants and members on the Left.“ (C2.25)

Furthermore:

“it seems to us that at least to a degree it is correct to assert that it did divert GLU staff from a focus on complaints and disciplinary action on antisemitism and other disciplinary cases”. (C2.32)

4. The trawling of social media

As part of this exercise social media were trawled for potential words of abuse. Forde says tellingly:

“We can see no legitimate non-factional reason why the search tool was apparently designed only to catch abuse aimed at MPs on the centre and Right of the Party, and to ignore the majority of abuse aimed at MPs on the Left (including Jeremy Corbyn).” (C2.24)

“In our view, however, this was by and large a factionally slanted exercise, designed and carried out with a startling lack of transparency, which had the goal of undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s chances in the leadership elections. It cemented mistrust of the motives of HQ staff in LOTO.” (C2.31)

Whether this lost Labour the 2017 election or not, it is clear that the party machine, aided and abetted by a large number of MPs and egged on by a hostile media, did whatever it could to undermine the Corbyn project. This activity was at its height during that general election campaign. It characterises HQ’s role for the entire period when Iain McNichol was General Secretary, and it continued in attenuated form after he was replaced by Jennie Formby as she attempted to reform the system.

In sum, the Report provides evidence time and again that largely validates what appears in the Leaked Report. But, in the spirit of even-handedness, guilty parties are consistently absolved of acting in “bad faith”. We wonder how on earth Forde could possibly have made this assessment as to motivation. No evidence is produced for it, and quite a lot in the Report actively undermines it.

Analysing antisemitism

On the antisemitism issue, so central to achieving the aim of undermining Jeremy Corbyn, we find the Report extraordinarily uneven.

It is quite explicit:

“It was of course also true that some opponents of Jeremy Corbyn saw the issue of antisemitism as a means of attacking him.”

But it immediately seeks to qualify the import of this by introducing its both-sides approach:

“Thus, rather than confront the paramount need to deal with the profoundly serious issue of antisemitism in the Party, both factions treated it as a factional weapon.” (Foreword, p.7)

It’s hard to know what the two sides are here. If someone is accused of antisemitism and questions the evidence, how can this very questioning be transmogrified into them treating it as a factional weapon?

Surely verifying the accuracy of any claims of antisemitism is essential to determining whether it is being weaponised or not. But for that there have to be clear, transparent criteria of what is to count as antisemitism. The vague illustrative examples in the IHRA definition of what might count, are of no help – the ‘Codes’ are internally contradictory, and the Party fails in all cases to explain what it determined to be antisemitic, and why, in the many cases of people disciplined under the catchall phrase “undermining the Party’s ability to combat racism”.

Notices of Investigation and suspension list items that the Party’s disputes staff deem ‘offensive’ or ‘antisemitic’. However, they never explain why they have reached that conclusion and the member is invited to both self-incriminate and prove their innocence of an unstated allegation. Even the IHRA document is qualified, saying that the examples may, depending on context, be evidence of antisemitism and, by implication, may also not be. The Party takes the prejudicial approach that because a statement appears to be similar to an IHRA example it can be presumed to be antisemitic, regardless.

However Forde seems to have been uninterested in the facts underlying claim or counter-claim. No attempt was made to estimate the scale of the problem, the degree to which antisemites were being given a free ride etc – the kinds of accusations hurled at the party by Jewish Labour Movement, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the self-styled ‘Labour Against Antisemitism’ and others. Weasel phrases appear instead of analysis: “some still deny the existence and seriousness of the problem” (p.6), “the paramount need to deal with the profoundly serious issue of antisemitism in the Party (p.7), “the frequent evidence of ‘denialism’ in relation to the seriousness of problems of antisemitism “ (p.13); “the problem within parts of the Party was clearly of major significance” (p.51). All of these assertions are evidence-free.

JVL,  for example, accused by the Jewish Chronicle, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and many others of “denialism”, has never claimed there was no problem of antisemitism in the party, as indeed there is in the wider society. We did and do contest the claim that there was a particular, widespread, “serious” problem. To call this denialism flies in the face of all rational criteria for assessing the reality of the problem in question. It is a horrifying accusation to make against Jews, all of whom have personal experience of antisemitism.

When we assessed the available evidence and experience of many hundreds of Jewish members we thankfully found very little, certainly nothing on the scale alleged. We have sought to help the Party understand the problem better, so that it may combat antisemitism inside the Party and elsewhere more effectively by producing a Declaration on Antisemitic Misconduct for its consideration. We regret that the Party  declined to engage with its analysis, just as it has refused to consider the authoritative Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism . (See for example, our official submission to the EHRC, August 2019, especially paras 32-39; our assessment of the JLM evidence to EHRC – Gossip, distortion, double standards and presumed guilt, a detailed analysis of over 150 claims made; Alan Maddison’s 20 September 2020 article The leaked Labour report: A quantitative assessment; and our Declaration on What is – and what is not – antisemitic misconduct.)

Curiously, whatever faults Forde found with the Leaked Report (and in reality he did not find many) he was clear that “In our view the Leaked Report’s authors were not seeking to play down or obscure the scale of antisemitism.” [Section B, p.15] Nor was LOTO, whose intervention (“interference”), was invited by the Governance and Legal Unit, most frequently in order to speed up the disciplinary process. Here Forde is explicit: “The emails demonstrate that LOTO’s involvement in disciplinary cases followed an enthusiastic invitation from GLU.” (C2.58); and “GLU staff were wrong to seek LOTO staff’s substantive input into disciplinary cases, and LOTO staff were wrong to give it. The advice from two LOTO staff members which was subsequently criticised was, however, requested insistently by GLU and in our view provided in good faith.” (C2.66)

“During Spring 2018, the period on which much of the reporting has focused, LOTO staff provided input into specific cases after it was sought, sometimes insistently, by HQ staff, who refused to proceed until they had it. HQ staff say that they were forced into making those requests by persistent “offline” interference by LOTO which they wanted to bring into the open; whatever HQ’s motives, however, we find that LOTO staff responded to the requests, for the most part, reasonably and in good faith. We note that their responses were subsequently used to form the basis of wholly misleading media reports which suggested that LOTO staff had aggressively imposed themselves on the process against HQ’s wishes.” (p.37)

Education and training

But most telling, we believe, is the fact that, the Party has not only got it spectacularly wrong about the “problem” of antisemitism but also about how to respond to it.

Here the evidence comes directly from Forde, in Section E on “The Culture, Structure and Practices of The Labour Party Organisation”, especially Section E.9. It is, in its quiet and often understated way, a massive onslaught on what currently passes for the Party’s strategy on antisemitism.

In brief, Forde says:

• “Simply adopting a “zero tolerance” approach will not resolve these issues. Although disciplinary action and expulsions may be appropriate in extreme cases, in many instances a meaningful educational and awareness building programme will be more effective. (p.101)
• “[T]he format and content of those early sessions really [sic! obviously should be “rarely”] addressed the problem they were designed to address…the sessions were largely didactic, top down and one dimensional – with little participation beyond the people presenting. This does not provide a space in which difficult issues, such as attitudes towards Israel, can be safely explored, in a nuanced way, and does not encourage deep reflection, the importance of which was emphasised by the participants at our roundtable meeting. we do not consider that such training is in accordance with best practice.” (E.9.2)
• What is needed instead are facilitated discussions with a small amount of preparatory reading with a careful “respectful dialogue…where everyone was listened to, even when there were disagreements”. (E9.6)
• The underlying model of education should be one that requires “engagement and deep listening by all participants, seeks to disentangle issues concerning discrimination within the Party from ongoing factional battles, sets a new and more helpful tone; aiming to help participants to grapple with the complexities of the issues themselves (rather than merely being the recipient of a particular policy).” (E9.7)
• “[E]ducation is key, promoting personal change… rather than relying on a ‘zero- tolerance’ disciplinary approach with expulsions”. (E9.9)
• “[A]ntisemitism education should not be divorced from that on all forms of racism and that such training should be based on an ethical stance that any form of racism is simply wrong morally. Antisemitism does need specific treatment but should also be integrated within a broader programme of anti-racism education.” (E9.10)
• There is a real danger, with Labour’s current Action Plan, “that it could be seen as establishing a new ‘hierarchy of racism’ (that some would argue replaces a previous hierarchy that did not take antisemitism sufficiently seriously).” (E9.10)

JVL has been consistently arguing for and providing antisemitism education based on these principles, where we have not been excluded from so doing. So we are pleased that our approach to antisemitism education is mentioned with approval in the report (E9.8) It goes on to say: “Hence we are disappointed that there has been a refusal to engage at all with Jewish Voice for Labour’s proposals for antisemitism education and that CLPs are, we are told, not even allowed to enlist their help.”

The Forde Report