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    Karie Murphy: I was Corbyn's chief of staff. We acted decisively to remove Labour antisemites Archived Message

    Posted by Sinister Burt on October 27, 2020, 9:49 am

    Nothing i didn't know but good to hear something from Karie on it for a change. Can't imagine the riddled-with-blairites-EHRC is going to do anything but continue the smear against the left with its report (with the guardian's help). Next it will be you're an antisemite and should be expelled if you disagree with the EHRC's (i assume) bogus conclusions. We won't i suppose ever be asked to consider the effective antisemitism (by their standards at least) of mcnichol and co for all the delays in process they provably caused for political ends (not to mention the seemingly racist comments against black members also shown in the leaks).

    https://www.dumptheguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/26/jeremy-corbyn-chief-of-staff-labour-antisemites-karie-murphy

    "In the coming weeks, we can expect to hear more about the handling of antisemitism complaints in the Labour party. That’s because the investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), launched last year, is due to be published.

    Dealing with the EHRC, and getting input into the investigation process, has not always been easy. So, as someone who was at the centre of dealing with these issues, in parliament and at Labour HQ, I want to set the record straight. Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, antisemites were removed from the Labour party more quickly, transparently and effectively than ever before.

    As his former chief of staff, I’m proud of that record. It wasn’t easy to deliver – not because Jeremy and our team weren’t absolutely committed to protecting Jewish members and communities. Far from it. Every action we took was aimed at creating a process that got antisemites out of the Labour party swiftly and fairly.

    In February 2016, I joined Jeremy’s office and soon afterwards became his chief of staff. Frankly, the party machine was dysfunctional. Its open civil war against the new leadership is well documented. But there was a deeper problem, at least as it related to proper processes for complaints and discrimination: there didn’t seem to be any. I found that the individual complaints system was a mess.

    This ugly backdrop informed the first flare-up of the antisemitism controversy in the Labour party as a major media story. That took place in April 2016, when old Facebook posts by the Labour MP Naz Shah and pro-Corbyn activist Jackie Walker surfaced, along with Ken Livingstone’s thoroughly offensive invocation of Hitler, in his attempted defence of Shah’s former online activity. Action was taken immediately and Naz worked hard to rebuild relations with the Jewish community.

    Jeremy had already made strong public statements earlier that month condemning antisemitism as “absolutely abhorrent and wrong”, and demanding action be taken in the party. He also commissioned a report from the leading human rights lawyer Shami Chakrabarti. The Board of Deputies of British Jews called for her recommendations to be implemented in a “rigorous and swift” manner.

    But despite assurances from the party HQ and the then-general secretary Iain McNicol, they weren’t, and the system continued not to function. The figures are stark. From an audit of more than 300 antisemitism complaints received by the party from November 2016 to February 2018, only 34 had been investigated, and of them only 10 were suspended at the time.

    This shocking failure of basic processes only began to become clear in April 2018, when Jennie Formby took over as general secretary.

    By 2019, I felt we were getting on top of the process problems in the party. The results are clear. In 2017, 28 cases brought to the National Executive Committee led to just one expulsion, while in 2019 274 cases led to 45, a more than four-fold increase in expulsions per case. We had a weekly, cross-departmental antisemitism working group of party officials, forcing through the necessary changes to the system. We didn’t deal with individual cases at the leadership level – and nor should we have done – but we did act to improve the overall process.

    Apart from one brief period in early 2018 – during a vacancy between general secretaries – the leader’s office was only consulted on a small number of cases involving MPs or other elected leaders, as has always been the case in the Labour party, with all types of complaints. And whenever we were asked for our view, we almost always suggested stronger and swifter action.

    Throughout the whole period, Jeremy asked me as his chief of staff to improve the process, get antisemites out of our party and begin to rebuild trust with Jewish communities.

    Many readers will find this all surprising given the dominant media narrative about antisemitism in the Labour party, but it is the truth. While victims of antisemitism and their allies rightly demanded action from the party, there has been an extremely successful campaign to obscure the facts. That was primarily driven by political opposition to Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist, internationalist politics. Last summer’s BBC Panorama programme about Labour and antisemitism claimed that there was political meddling from Corbyn’s team to protect antisemites. There wasn’t.

    For a brief period in early 2018, between Iain McNicol leaving and Jennie Formby taking over as general secretary, those running the governance and legal unit began asking Corbyn’s team for their views on individual cases. Not only did we not ask for this oversight of individual cases, I thought it was a factional trap and I put a stop to it.

    I’m not speaking out for the first time to dismiss the fact that antisemitism reared its head among a small minority in the Labour party. It did. It was wrong and the party as a whole was slow to deal with it effectively. That failure, combined with a relentless and highly politicised media campaign had a serious impact: it hurt Jewish people and disturbed and confused many in our movement. Could more have been done earlier? Yes, of course. But what was done – including changes to the party’s rules and instituting detailed guidance on antisemitism for an expanded complaints team – unquestionably made it easier and swifter to remove antisemites from the party.

    I hope Keir Starmer and his team build on the hugely improved system I believe we instituted, and he uses the space afforded to him by the dialling down of the politicised media campaign on this issue to rebuild relations and trust with Jewish communities. It deeply saddens me that we were unable to do so. But it wasn’t for want of trying, let alone because of any tolerance of antisemitism.

    • Karie Murphy served as Jeremy Corbyn’s chief of staff from 2016 to 2020"

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