By Tony O’Riley-
New Labour leader, Neil Starmer, has begged his wounded party to bury the factionalism that is destroying his party. It is barely two weeks since Starmer took over from Jeremy Corbyn after the former Labour leader was humiliated by a rounded defeat in the hands of prime minister Boris Johnson, and his party have made some headlines for the wrong reasons.
Johnson battered him in one of the widest elections victories in recent times, and hardcore Labour supporters felt the Tories needed a new face who could give them a run for their money. Starmer quickly reshuffled his cabinet by getting rid of many of Corbyn allies, as he hoped to bring a fresh approach to the party. Instead, the stinking rancour that has festered in his party for years has overshadowed his new leadership.A leaked report exposed the deep levels of hostilities, division, racism, and unreliability of party members to embarrassing levels.
A zoom video call to party members on Wednesday evening, the new Labour leader pleaded with his party to stop the division wrecking the party’s image. He pleaded: “We have to stop the factionalism in our party. We have to create a different culture where we respect and support each other in a different way,” he said.
“We are going to have to have change here. We have got to bury this factionalism that has meant too many people seeing things through factional eyes instead of pulling tougher and supporting our party.
“If we carry on taking lumps out of each other we are heading for a loss at the next general election.
“If we lose the next general election, that will be five in a row, and we will be out of power as a party for longer than any period since the Second World War.”
Starmer warned that “everybody who is taking a lump out of somebody else” in the party was “letting down” the voters “that most need us”.
The leaked 860 page report into the way Labour handled anti semitism complaints and which reveals the extent of rancour in the Labour party may have damaged the party’s reputation beyond repair. The report first seen and published by Sky News, reveals over 10,000 separate emails, thousands of private WhatsApp communications between former senior party officials , and a series of resentful expressions against Various members of the Labour party, including Jeremy Corbyn .
It states: “By the time a new general secretary took over Party HQ in April 2018 there was a backlog of cases that had been ongoing, often for years, with little to no progress, and with information on their status and content scattered across different systems and central and regional offices.
“Some of these were high-profile cases, awaiting decision at NEC or NCC level. There was, further, a hidden backlog of people reported to GLU for antisemitism, but never dealt with or mishandled, many of whom would be re-reported subsequently, or were picked up in spring 2018 as Iain McNicol was leaving.”
The report says there is no record of action being taken on a number of cases including one member who wished for Corbyn’s death and others that involved Islamophobic comments.
The report claims private communications show senior former staff “openly worked against the aims and objectives of the leadership of the Party, and in the 2017 general election some key staff even appeared to work against the Party’s core objective of winning elections”.
The report says the WhatsApp communications in question, which included some of the most senior figures in the party headquarters and Lord McNicol’s office, were leaked by one of the group’s members.
Timetables
The report claims McNicol and staff in the Governance and Legal Unit “provided timetables for the resolution of cases that were never met; falsely claimed to have processed all antisemitism complaints; falsely claimed that most complaints received were not about Labour members and provided highly inaccurate statistics of antisemitism complaints”.
Responding to the messages cited and the allegations made against him in the report, Lord McNicol said:”The energy and effort that must have been invested in trawling 10,000 emails rather than challenging antisemitism in the party is deeply troubling.
It states that there was a failure to develop “detailed or coherent guidelines for investigating complaints based on social media conduct” and a failure to “implement the Macpherson principle of logging and investigating complaints of racism as racism”. Following what the report describes as a “systematic review” of all complaints received between November 2016 to February 2018, it claims investigations were initiated into only 34 of the more than 300 complaints received in relation to antisemitism.
“At least half of these warranted action, many of them in relation to very extreme forms of antisemitism, but were ignored. Almost all of these complaints were forwarded from one inbox to another, and many of them were identified as Labour members and sent to the Head of Disputes, Sam Matthews, for action”, the report claims.