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    PLP deliberately dragged their heels to make Corbyn look bad Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on January 12, 2020, 12:23 pm, in reply to "What would have happened if a group of Conservative Party backbenchers"

    'But Long-Bailey added: “There were things that should have happened far quicker. We should have sped up our processes. We should have listened to Jewish communal organisations and involved them, and now we’re in a situation where trust has been completely broken.'

    Funny, I was just reading how the Labour establishment deliberately hobbled responses to the allegations of a/s in order to make Corbyn look bad. Surely Long-Bailey will be aware of this.

    *****

    https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/statement/rebuttals/#7


    7. Failure to deal with antisemitism in the Labour Party
    The allegation

    Following the Chakrabarti Report into racism and antisemitism in the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn did nothing. It was just business as usual and antisemitism went – and continues to go – unpunished.
    A brief rebuttal

    The Labour NEC accepted Chakrabarti’s main recommendations at the end of June 2016, almost immediately after their publication. However, implementation fell to the party machine, over which Corbyn had no control or influence as staff answered to the (then) right-dominated NEC. Yet the party machine, led by long-standing Blairite General Secretary Iain McNicol, was the very body the Chakrabarti Report had found unfit for that purpose (esp. Section 5, p.14f).

    The delays in dealing with complaints of antisemitism in this period are attributable to the activities of the party machine – which Corbyn and his supporters could do nothing about until the left won NEC control and Jennie Formby became General Secretary.
    More details

    1. After Tony Blair’s election as party leader in 1994, the party was re-fashioned, power was centralised, and members mostly side-lined. For over 20 years, employment in the party apparatus­ went almost exclusively to sympathisers with the Blairite agenda. (The same applied to most candidates selected for winnable Parliamentary seats.)

    2. When Corbyn was elected, centre/right bureaucrats still controlled the party machine. Only after formidable General Secretary Iain (now Lord) McNicol, was winkled out in March 2018 did the bureaucracy start to change, though this is still a work in progress.

    3. After Corbyn’s election, complaints of antisemitism and other offences were soon launched in bulk against leftist/Corbyn-supporting/pro-Palestinian activists. It is believed that Party officials used a computer algorithm to trawl social media to find members who had used ‘forbidden’ and ‘antisemitic’ words.

    4. The most common next step was immediate suspension pending lengthy investigation. It isn’t clear how many were suspended, but it was in the thousands. This self-induced pressure massively overloaded the party’s disciplinary procedures and left many suspended members in limbo for months, even years.

    5. Since Jennie Formby’s election as General Secretary in April 2018, there has been rapid reform and substantial progress. Formby wrote to the PLP in February 2019:

    “I had witnessed first-hand that our complaints and disputes procedures were not fit for purpose, with longstanding cases that hadn’t been dealt with, alongside new cases coming in, especially in relation to appalling antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories, mostly on social media. . .urgent action was needed to ensure our processes for dealing with complaints were robust, efficient and fair; to resolve outstanding cases; and to establish political education to deepen understanding about, and combat, antisemitism within our movement. Since then, we’ve made significant progress. . .”

    6. In February 2019, Formby released antisemitism case statistics starting from 10 days after she became General Secretary (they weren’t kept before!). These showed a total of 1,106 complaints of which 433 were not even Labour Party members, with evidence against a further 220 too flimsy for a case to answer. That left 453 to investigate (0.08% of Labour’s membership). The available evidence left a potential maximum of 212 determinations of antisemitism – under 0.04% of Labour’s membership.

    7. In May 2019 we learned the depths that the old bureaucratic right-wing rearguard has plumbed to undermine the Corbyn project: evidence emerged that in order to present Corbyn in the worst possible light, full-time party staff had been refusing to deal with allegations of antisemitism and had shredded thousands of crucial documents (while keeping personal copies with which they could embarrass the Party after leaving their jobs).
    More detailed accounts

    Alan Maddison, Antisemitism: no justification for singling out Labour, 16 Feb 2019
    Jon Lansman, Jeremy Corbyn pushed for action on antisemitism – but was held back by bureaucracy, LabourList, 14 May 2019
    Skwawkbox, Excl: departing right-wing Labour staff ‘shredded’ 1000s of disciplinary docs – but gave copies to press, 20 May 2019
    Anushka Asthana Corbyn accuses Labour officials of suspending party members without explanation, Guardian, 28 August 2016

    *****

    Quoted in the Verso e-book, 'Antisemitism and the Labour Party' which you can download here: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4508-antisemitism-and-the-labour-party Highly recommended!

    I

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