The work of the Labour Party's Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014 - 2019

[Seanchaidh]

So I found a digital copy of this report, and... I have not read the whole thing. It's long. But what is most interesting to me about it is that it seems to indicate that a substantial portion of the Labour antisemitism scandal in the UK was a direct result of deliberate sabotage by right-leaning party officials who preferred that Tories would win instead of Jeremy Corbyn. And who also liked to joke about lighting further left people on fire and other grotesqueries.

[tweet t="https://twitter.com/shaun_vids/status/1249497952772673536"]

This was my source for the document: https://www.sendspace.com/file/hw0qk9

Also, I'm super jealous that Labour has the perceived problem of being infiltrated by "Trotskyists".

None of this is to say that there was not a significant volume of antisemitic abuse happening within the Labour party, and the report makes clear, I guess-- or at least it says it does, as I haven't read it far enough so far to personally evaluate the details-- this explicitly.

 

[Silvanus]

I was considering making a thread on this myself. It's seriously damning stuff, and backed up by direct transcripts, showing;

* Labour staffers describing their disappointment that Labour performed well in 2017, with one explicitly saying that performing well was "the opposite" of what she had worked for.

* Staffers discussing allocating resources from the General Election fund to a separate fund to protect specific MPs' seats, and discussing that this allocation must be kept secret from their own Party auditors.

 

[Seanchaidh]

Staff repeatedly used abusive and inappropriate language about the leader, MPs, Labour members and about other staff. For example, staff discussed "hanging and burning" Jeremy Corbyn, calling Corbyn a "lying little toerag"; said that any Labour MP "who nominates Corbyn 'to widen the debate' deserves to be taken out and shot"; and stated that a staff member who "whooped" during Corbyn?s speech "should be shot". Senior staff also said they hoped that one Labour member on the left of the party "dies in a fire". Senior Labour staff used language that was considerably more abusive and inappropriate than that cited as justification for suspending many Labour members who supported Jeremy Corbyn in 2016.

I'm a step closer to understanding the motivation for Stalin's purges, I think.

Staff applied the same factional approach to disciplinary processes. One staff member referred to Emilie Oldknow expecting staff to "fabricate a case" against people "she doesn?t like/her friends don't like" because of their political views. During the 2015 leadership election GLU and other Labour staff described their work as "hunting out 1000s of trots" and a "Trot hunt", which included excluding people for having "liked" the Greens on Facebook. One prominent GLU staffer, Head of Disputes Katherine Buckingham, admitted that "real work is piling up" while she and other staff were engaged in inappropriate factional work.

That step is apparently somewhere distantly trailing these people.