Written by Corbyn’s allies, ostensibly to show that a “hyper-factional atmosphere” undermined the party’s response to anti-Semitism complaints, the document proves that the party apparatus waged a relentless, reactionary campaign against its own membership and that Corbyn went along with this witch-hunt.
The reportThe report draws on roughly 10,000 emails, thousands of messages exchanged on the party’s internal messaging service, and 400,000 words of messages in two WhatsApp groups for senior party staff. As hundreds of thousands of workers and youth signed up to the Labour Party, with illusions that Corbyn would lead a fight against austerity and war, staff at Labour’s head office were running, in their own words, a “Stasi system” to purge left-wing sentiment.
Anatomy of a conspiracy
Although the specific instances of abuse detailed are shocking, it has only fleshed out a conspiracy which was already widely known. Labour’s members have had to wait years for the details because Corbyn and his allies refused to oppose the campaign against them and systematically suppressed any struggle against it by the rank and file. His sermons on Labour’s “broad church” and party “unity” were a political shield, behind which a vicious cabal could carry on policing any leftist 'thought crimes' in the Labour Party.In 2015, when Corbyn’s campaign began to gather steam in the Labour leadership election, the apparatus went on the offensive, looking for pretexts to expel members and supporters or bar them from voting.
“The entire full-time staff of the Labour Party, along with constituency party branches and university Labour Clubs, is now exclusively occupied in investigating those who have paid £3 to become Labour supporters to vote in the leadership contest. … The stench of McCarthyism hangs over the Labour Party, which is underscored by the naming of the investigation of sign-ups as ‘Operation Icepick’ in an obscene reference to the weapon used to assassinate Leon Trotsky,” wrote one leftwing
critic.
The leaked report shows that these new supporters were repeatedly referred to by at least 40 Labour staff members as “trots.” The word—a derogatory term for Trotskyists—appears hundreds of times in the document, in the context of a violent hatred shared across Labour’s offices for anyone “left Brown.”
Party officials wrote about the need for “pepper spray” and “water cannons” at Labour’s annual conference and major rallies, which they feared would be overrun by “rampaging trots.” In reference to one well-attended rally, Governance and Legal Unit (GLU) Director John Stolliday wrote, “Truncheons out lads, let’s knock some trots.” While these words are metaphorical, the mindset expressed is clear. They were at war with the hard left.
Corbyn, who was held responsible for this influx of left-leaning members, was abused in psychopathic terms. One staff member wrote, “anyone who nominates corbyn ‘to widen the debate’ deserves to be taken out and shot.” Another said that a staff member who cheered one of Corbyn’s speeches “should be shot.” Two different officials discussed “hanging and burning” Corbyn and another said “death by fire is too kind” for him and his leadership team. Sarah Mulholland, Secretary of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), said of a Corbyn-supporting Young Labour member, who was known to suffer from mental health issues, “I hope [the young member] dies in a fire.”
None of these shootings or hangings or burnings ever took place. Perhaps these people were trying to express the intensity of their opposition to their political opponents. Still, it doesn't look good.
As it became clear that Labour’s thousands of new members and supporters would win Corbyn the leadership, senior staff discussed delaying or cancelling the process either on the pretext “of whether we have the resources to do the checks” or by having the other candidates “just drop out next week and the whole thing would have to be halted.”
When these plans proved untenable, Labour HQ organised the mass expulsion of members. The work, considered “a priority,” was discussed in terms of “hunting out 1000s of trots,” “trot busting,” “bashing trots,” “trot spotting,” “the trot hunt,” “trot purge” and “trot hunting.” People who joined groups protesting these actions, like the Stop the Labour Purge Facebook page, were specifically targeted for exclusion. Others were thrown out for liking or retweeting material from organisations like the People’s Assembly, UK Uncut, the National Health Action Party and the Green Party.
This witch-hunt failed to prevent Corbyn’s victory on an overwhelming mandate. The mood in Labour’s head office was apocalyptic, with staff writing “we’re so fucking screwed,” “irrevocably fucked,” “not sure how much more I can take.”
But all despondency was immediately dispelled by Corbyn’s selection of a shadow cabinet of warmongers, demobilising of opposition to austerity with the order that Labour councils enforce Tory cuts, and endorsement of the right-wing Remain campaign in the Brexit referendum. Emboldened by Corbyn’s capitulations, the right-wing conspiracy was escalated with the 2016 leadership election, triggered by a coup mounted by Labour’s Blairite MPs.
The right wing campaign waged was vicious—including denying more than 130,000 members and supporters the right to vote, and utilising the Orwellian Compliance Unit to trawl through online accounts to find ‘evidence’ of thought crimes.
“The designation of this purge as ‘Operation Icepick,’ along with the routine denunciation of ‘Trotskyite infiltrators’ is apposite, given that an historical precedent can only be found in Stalin’s Russia.”
According to the report, Labour HQ initially solicited legal advice to argue that Corbyn should not automatically appear on the ballot if not nominated by MPs. When this failed, the GLU began trawling through Labour members’ and applicant supporters’ social media accounts to find a pretext for expulsion or rejection.
Algorithms were designed to search for negative comments about a specific list of Blairite MPs. After the release of the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War, a general search was made for the phrase “war criminal” or for references to “warmongers,” with staff worrying about “an influx of antiwar angry people.” Phrases like “red Tory,” “pseudo Tory,” “undercover Blairite,” “backstabber” and “Tory lite” were also searched for as the basis for expulsion. Specific fishing operations were launched against those signed up to left-wing Facebook groups. GLU’s Head of Disputes and then Acting Director Sam Matthews said of “Nye Bevan News,” “we can probably suspend everyone who is a member of the page.”
Outside of leadership elections, senior staff persistently sought to interfere with or overturn the party’s democratic processes to block perceived left-wingers gaining positions. Matthews and GLU Executive Director Emilie Oldknow worked to prevent Corbyn ally Rebecca Long-Bailey being selected as a Manchester representative on the party’s governing body. They also discussed maintaining the suspension of Wallasey Constituency Labour Party to give anti-Corbyn MP Angela Eagle more “time to organise” to win the annual general meeting. Party General Secretary Ian McNicol discussed with other senior staff plans to delay changes in Labour Party youth elections that would benefit pro-Corbyn groups.
Labour HQ repeatedly acted against the electoral interests of the Labour Party, in the hope of demoralising Corbyn’s supporters and helped Deputy Leader Tom Watson leak party documents. Staff in the GLU planned to install Watson as an interim leader following what they hoped would be a Labour defeat in 2017 and diverted hundreds of thousands of pounds of party funds to a “secret key seats team” to support Blairite MPs.
These efforts were a failure. Corbyn came out of the 2017 election in an unassailable position. Had he wanted to, Corbyn could have thrown out the Blairite conspirators with the full backing of the Labour membership. Instead, Corbyn worked with close ally Jon Lansman to establish their own political police force in the form of Momentum —the supposed “grassroots” campaign group nominally founded to further the left-wing transformation of the Labour Party. In reality from the beginning, this organisation was the pliant tool of Lansman, designed to neuter any rank-and-file opposition which developed to the party’s Blairite core.
Jon Lansman (credit: Wikipedia)The investigation explains, “Trotskyists”—by which it means members of various left groups—“did try to organise within local groups of Momentum. But in January 2017, Momentum implemented a constitution which excluded anyone who was not a member of the Labour Party …”
At Labour’s 2018 annual congress, Momentum joined with Corbyn and the trade unions to prevent the mandatory reselection of Labour MPs. In 2019, a fraudulently organised national campaign to deselect Blairite MPs was turned into a rout. Wherever Labour members tried to wage a fight against Blairite MPs and officials on their own initiative, Corbyn intervened personally to shut them down.
The events of the last five years cannot be understood outside of a reckoning with these actions of the so-called “Labour lefts,” which were the decisive elements in the victory of the Blairite conspiracy.
Corbyn and the anti-Semitism witch-hunt
Claims that Labour was “institutionally anti-Semitic”—which reached the hysterical and cynical low of branding the party an “existential threat” to British Jews—were a continuation of the party’s right-wing campaign against its membership by other means.A campaign was launched by the right-wing of the British Labour party to paint Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite, in hopes of driving him from his position as leader of the party. In its scale and ferocity, these efforts have all the hallmarks of a destabilisation campaign involving MI5 in the UK, Mossad in Israel and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the United States.
Using internal party statistics, the leaked Labour investigation finds that there were 34 actions taken against members for anti-Semitism between November 2016 and February 2018, while the Blairites controlled the party apparatus. The investigation’s authors estimate that there were an additional 170 complaints which ought to have been actioned, giving a total of 204 cases, or 0.037 percent of Labour’s membership. In 2018, there were 283 suspensions and investigations, with no action taken against 133 people, and 10 members expelled. In 2019, with pressure for “action” on anti-Semitism reaching fever pitch, there were 579 suspensions and investigations (0.1 percent of the membership), with no action taken against 255 people and 45 expelled.
Even accepting that all these expulsions were fair, and the cases of high-profile figures show they were not, anti-Semitism was a miniscule fringe phenomenon in the Labour Party.
The anti-Semitism “crisis” was politically manufactured. Right-wing individuals supportive of the Israeli state submitted thousands of spurious complaints of alleged anti-Semitism and told fabricated horror stories to the media. The GLU ignored or delayed responses to a handful of genuine cases of anti-Semitism while presenting a misleading picture of the number and nature of complaints being received. This provided the fuel for hysterical headlines about Labour’s “inaction” and the anti-Semitism of the “left.”
In early 2017, dossiers of allegations were submitted by the Labour Against Anti-Semitism group. The group claimed publicly in 2018 to have submitted 700 individual reports of alleged anti-Semitism, when the real number was just over 100.
In 2019, half of anti-Semitism complaints came from one Labour Party member “who is trawling social media for evidence” and is often “rude and abusive” towards party staff and members. A “large proportion” of his complaints are duplicates, and do not refer to Labour members or to members already in the disciplinary process, “something the complainant has been told repeatedly.” They “regularly submit complaints about people sharing Jewish-related articles, with the comment ‘They’re not Jewish’.”
Material of this kind was manipulated for maximum effect by party staff. Last summer, several news sites reported that employees at Labour HQ had resigned from the party’s offices and destroyed key complaints documents as they left, keeping copies which were then leaked to the press as evidence of “inaction.” The report provides similar examples.
Between November 2016 and February 2018, 79 percent of actions taken against members for anti-Semitism did not flow from the work of the GLU. Matthews allowed unresolved cases to pile up in the Disputes inbox. When asked for reports on anti-Semitism complaints procedures in 2018, he provided inaccurate figures. Matthews and McNicol repeatedly claimed to be pursuing cases when they were not. Once a backlog had been built up, and after McNicol had left the post of general secretary, Matthews and Oldknow broke with previous procedure to begin forwarding cases to the Labour leadership’s office. These emails were then leaked to the media as “evidence” of interference by the leadership in the complaints process.
Every smear was amplified by a complicit corporate media. In July 2019, McNicol and Matthews were invited onto a BBC “Panorama” hatchet job, “Is Labour Anti-Semitic?” to spread lies about the membership and criticise the failings they had orchestrated.
Cases which were repeatedly delayed included those for which extensive evidence of Holocaust denial existed. At least one was deliberately ignored to pursue a malicious investigation against left-wing activist and Jewish Voice for Labour member, Glyn Secker.
In the face of all this evidence, the report nonetheless accepts the allegations of Labour’s anti-Semitism problem as good coin, explicitly stating the manifestly untrue: that “This report thoroughly disproves any suggestion that antisemitism is not a problem in the Party, or that it is all a ‘smear’ or a ‘witch-hunt’.”
To legitimise the witch-hunt, Matthews’ and McNicol’s duplicitous actions are absurdly held to be the product of “bureaucratic drift and inertia.”
The investigation even claims that the essential significance of the sprawling conspiracy against the party’s membership was that it encouraged an alleged culture of “denialism” towards anti-Semitism, which the membership is accused of harbouring. This contemptible accusation aims to justify not only the actions of the Blairites, but of Corbyn in going along with the anti-Semitism witch-hunt.
A part of the investigation concludes, “This section has demonstrated that Jeremy Corbyn, [Shadow Chancellor] John McDonnell and Leader’s Office staff urged that candidates accused of antisemitism be removed and disciplinary action taken …” They specifically called for Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth and Jackie Walker’s cases to “be concluded swiftly, as called for by Jewish stakeholders.” Chris Williamson MP was given the same treatment.
None of these individuals are anti-Semites and all of them have spent a lifetime in the “left” of the Labour Party, working in close political collaboration with Corbyn. Yet when Livingstone was given a two-year suspension by the National Constitutional Committee in April 2018, the report notes, “WhatsApp messages make clear that LOTO [Office of the Leader of the Opposition, i.e., Corbyn] staff had expected Livingstone to be expelled and were both shocked and unhappy about this decision.”
John McDonnellLater, “GLU did not commence a new investigation into Ken Livingstone, and it was LOTO staff who repeatedly chased them to do so.”
Finally, Corbyn’s advisor Seumas Milne “discussed with Oldknow trying to arrange that Ken Livingstone resign from the party rather than go through another disciplinary case.”
Walker, who is black and Jewish, was expelled after “Jeremy Corbyn and [new General Secretary and Corbyn ally] Jennie Formby met with the Board of Deputies, Jewish Leadership Council and the Community and Security Trust, which stated that the Party should expedite Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker’s cases.”
The report details how “Walker’s case demonstrates a continual drive from LOTO staff … to seek a speedy and decisive resolution.”
Williamson’s suspension received the go-ahead from Corbyn’s Political Secretary Amy Jackson: “I agree something needs to be done today. People from all sides of the Party are absolutely furious with him.”
Momentum head Jon Lansman became Corbyn’s liaison officer with the most ardent Zionist reactionaries. As the report explains, he was instrumental in Labour’s endorsement of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, which includes as examples of supposed anti-Semitism denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, that is, by claiming that the state of Israel is wrong to make continuous war on the Palestinians.
In 2018, Momentum’s Digital Media Manager Harry Hayball oversaw the organisation’s own investigations and disciplining of those accused of anti-Semitism. He “met with a wide range of stakeholders from JLM, Jewish communal organisations and the wider Jewish community,” the investigation states, and “studied the history of antisemitism on the left from works such as Steve Cohen’s ‘That’s Funny You Don’t Look Antisemitic’ and Dave Rich’s ‘The Left’s Jewish Problem’.”
Hayball was hired by the GLU itself the following year, in July 2019, as a Senior Governance Officer dealing specifically with anti-Semitism. He joined Patrick Smith, made Head of Disputes in June 2019. The report states that Smith “was hired specifically because of his knowledge of anti-Semitism and the forms it takes on the left ...”
Smith is a former organiser for the leftwing activist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty group. Alongside Smith, Laura Murray—daughter of Corbyn’s Stalinist adviser, Andrew Murray—was seconded to the GLU in 2019 as its Head of Complaints. Hayball and Smith dramatically escalated the investigations into Labour’s membership, trawling social media for “problematic” search terms and evidence of “denialism,” “defensiveness” or criticism of pro-Zionist “Labour MPs and affiliates.”
Andrew MurrayAccording to guidance drawn up by this team, examples of “problematic” posts include, “arguing that Israel misuses the Holocaust to its own ends,” “inappropriate sharing of Jewish people, such as Norman Finkelstein, speaking about the Holocaust in an aggressive or inappropriate way” and “inappropriate emphasis on non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, as if there is too much focus on Jews.” On Israel and Zionism, the guidance states, “it must be expected that Jewish people or Israeli people have greater freedom to discuss these issues.”
These were not just examples of political cowardice, but the political endorsements of a right-wing witch-hunt. This is confirmed by the fact that Corbyn’s allies went on to oversee and even step up the disciplinary process from January 2018, after securing a majority on Labour’s National Executive Committee.
One observer noted: "Never once did Corbyn] defend his own supporters, including Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson, who were expelled or forced to resign from the party over false accusations of anti-Semitism. Instead, he has now apologized repeatedly for a supposed failure to deal rigorously and speedily with anti-Semitism.”
An anti-Trotskyist political police force
The timing of the leak of the Labour Party investigation marks an appropriate endpoint to Corbyn’s five-year record of political surrender and collusion. It was not revealed in a major public rally or presented to sections of the party as the basis for a political campaign against the conspirators. Quite the opposite. The report’s authors affect surprise at their findings, writing, “Labour Party staff, who are employed by the Party rather than as political advisers to politicians, are expected to act impartially and serve the Party, regardless of the current Leader …” They even state baldly that they are “not concerned with the rights and wrongs of different political positions espoused by different factions and individuals in the Labour Party in the preceding five years.”The leak was only carried out after Corbyn and McDonnell had already resigned, after a new shadow cabinet of Blairite reactionaries had been installed under new leader 'Sir' Keir Starmer, and after Corbyn himself nominated Tom Watson and Ian McNicol for life peerages in the House of Lords!
The sole purpose of leaking the investigation is to guard against its suppression as evidence in the politically motivated Equality and Human Rights Commission inquiry into anti-Semitic discrimination in the Labour Party. The key message Corbyn wanted to get out is that he and his team were anxious to root out anti-Semitism from the party but were prevented from doing so by the “hyper-factional atmosphere” generated by his opponents.
Labour’s members, meanwhile, are tarred with the accusation of anti-Semitism, or at least “denialism,” and left at the mercy of a renewed right-wing assault. The scandal over the investigation has already been used as a springboard for a new offensive. Starmer has taken no action on the prima facie evidence against Labour staff, telling party members, “We have to stop the factionalism in our party.” Last Thursday, Labour’s National Executive Committee agreed to open an investigation into the contents of the report and the way it came to be authored and leaked, due to report in mid-July. The NEC meeting, which included multiple supposed “lefts” including Jon Lansman, was described by Labour List as “not an acrimonious one.”
Meanwhile the attack by the Blairites and Zionists continues apace. The Labour Party is reportedly facing up to £8 million worth of legal suits for breach of privacy by the right-wing scoundrels named in the report. Skwawkbox cite Labour sources who say that those thought to have had a hand in compiling and leaking the investigation are already facing suspension.
On April 16, members of the GMB trade union at Labour HQ passed a motion of no confidence in General Secretary Jennie Formby, claiming that she had “effectively unilaterally placed all members of staff under investigation” and demanding that she “personally apologise to the current staffers named in the report.”
A social media backlash forced GMB General Secretary Tim Roache to claim that the union was “not going for” Formby and would at least wait for Labour’s “independent inquiry” before doing so! His position was made clear by the comment that “Leaking an un-redacted report, containing names and personal messages of employees and the names of people who made complaints about racism on the understanding of anonymity, is unacceptable.”
Novara Media report that the pro-Zionist Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) is calling for any Constituency Labour Party organisations which even discuss the document to be suspended. Starmer has already promised a stepped-up witch-hunt of the Labour membership in cooperation with the JLM, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Community and Security Trust. This purge could take place under the oversight of none other than leading conspirator Emilie Oldknow, one of Starmer’s top choices to replace Formby as Labour’s general secretary—again, according to Novara Media .
Oldknow is assistant secretary general at the Unison union, an employer she shares with former GLU colleague John Stolliday, who is now the head of Unison’s Member Liaison Unit. At least one journalist has reported that the union’s General Secretary Dave Prentis has assured these two right-wing plotters of his support and protection. Unison backed Starmer in the recent Labour leadership contest, saying he was “best placed to unite” Labour.
These are historically significant events.
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