Here's another THREAD on the circle that @UKLabour are trying to square. Sam Matthews told @BBCPanorama it was an "outrage" that the party was going to let Ken Livingstone "back in" after his 2-year suspension...
What neither Matthews nor the programme mentioned was that his own team had failed to act on antisemitism complaints about Livingstone during his initial period of suspension, which could have prevented his readmission to the party...
Buzzfeed reported in May 2019 that the Governance and Legal Unit (during the period Matthews was head of disputes) took no action on these complaints for an astonishing nine months after they were first lodged, and for two months after repeated appeals by the leader’s office...
These appeals followed concerns raised by the Jewish Labour Movement about the lack of progress in Livingstone’s case; concerns raised directly with the leader’s office in January 2018...
In one email to the GLU director, a former Corbyn aide asked if Livingstone had received a second suspension for his subsequent comments. But the response was a brush off: “We haven’t formally opened a new investigation yet, and that is a conversation we will have over here”...
The Livingstone example suggests that the leadership acted promptly on concerns raised directly by the JLM, encouraging swifter and tougher sanctions against Livingstone, without unduly interfering in the decision-making process itself...
Ware himself has recently stated that the programme “interrogated the evidence of whistleblowers that members of [the leader’s office] (despite their denials) had interfered with the disciplinary process” and that...
“there is compelling evidence to show that some members of [the leader’s office] and [the national executive] did sometimes inhibit and even intervene in a number of antisemitism cases”...
If the programme-makers did indeed “interrogate” such evidence, they could hardly have been unaware of, or indifferent to the leaked emails published by Buzzfeed, which seemed to fundamentally contradict the accounts given by the “whistleblowers”...
In a recent submission to the High Court, the BBC claimed that the programme quoted “other emails that indicated that the leader’s office was attempting to hasten the complaint process”.
That was simply not true.
That was simply not true.
