Thread by @brokenbottleboy

The EHRC report on antisemitism in the Labour Party and the party’s handling of complaints is 130 pages long. I am currently on page 53. The immediate reports so far are based on briefings before publication/the executive summaries. Read the report here equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/…

So far I have encountered a good number of examples in the report of issues that were down to Labour HQ, the party’s permanent staff, as much as LOTO but the focus will be on Corbyn and his staff. The leaked report on Labour HQ is largely dismissed by the EHRC

Broadly, the story as I see it so far is this — Labour had a significant number of members who were antisemitic (as the Tories also do), the Corbyn team didn’t take that seriously enough to begin with and were too close to people who held those antisemitic views...

... but Labour HQ was poorly run and acted deliberately to make the antisemitism crisis more serious. The EHRC is ruling that the Party is responsible for the actions of individual members...

... the examples around LOTO interference in complaints include ones where Corbyn’s team pressed harder for Ken Livingstone to be suspended.

My feeling is that the focus should be on the fact that Labour HQ appears to have exacerbated the problem of antisemitism by creating a backlog of cases. Corbyn was not remotely strong enough in his leadership and the party “machine” was a mess.

I would like to see numbers for how many complaints of antisemitism were received by the Labour Party under previous leaders, as well as Conservative Party numbers. Boris Johnson commited— hollowly — to address his party’s Islamaphobic members. He hasn’t.

There should also be a Leveson-style inquiry into antisemtism and islamophobia in the British media. The Daily Mail, Sun and others were explicitly antisemitic on their front pages when Ed Miliband was leader. They attacked his father. They made a weird thing of bacon sandwiches.

I am listening to BBC 5Live where John Ware — who was behind the Panorama investigation — is talking about the report entirely free of context other than his pre-existing conclusions. Read the report and draw your conclusions.

Finally, I believe that antisemitism is an extremely serous issue both in the Labour Party and in wider British society. There has been a rise in attacks on Jewish people in the past 20 years and that should not be minimised.