Pogrund and Maguire chronicle the repeated attempts to head off disaster in the early phases of the crisis. Not every proposal seems plausible – it is hard to imagine Corbyn visiting Jerusalem, or risking a visit to a school full of unpredictable teenagers – but the failure to act on any of them is inexcusable. Jones narrates the wretched launch of Shami Chakrabarti’s first inquiry into antisemitism in 2016, when Corbyn seemed to his critics to equate Israel and Islamic State, thus creating a row that overshadowed its findings (themselves subsequently sidelined). A missed opportunity to give a speech at the Jewish Museum and the failure to pursue offers from pro-Corbyn Jewish intellectuals to ghostwrite or consult, seem negligent at best. The removal of any apology from Corbyn’s initial statement seeking to explain his approving Facebook comment on a mural featuring an antisemitic caricature was, in the words of Corbyn’s aide Laura Murray, ‘fucking stupid and tone-deaf’.
Part of the problem (again) was Corbyn’s obvious chafing against the requirements of party leadership, which now included engaging with strands of Jewish opinion he found uncongenial. Progress on the issue was continually blocked, not least because some of Corbyn’s long-standing allies on the anti-Zionist Jewish left – many of them his constituents – would persuade him that he didn’t really need to change anything. The issue was personal, too: friends testify that Corbyn – proud of decades of anti-racist activism inside and beyond the Labour Party – was deeply hurt by the attacks on him, especially when they came from newspapers with flagrant histories of racism. This is understandable, but it shows a degree of vanity a political leader can ill afford in a crisis.
The EHRC’s statutory inquiry into Labour is a sober, conservative and often lawyerly examination of the problem. It finds Labour responsible for three breaches of equality law, including indirect discrimination against Jews and harassment of Jews by party agents. It draws particular attention to political interference in the complaints process. Its recommendations – the central one is the establishment of an independent complaints process for antisemitism – were universally welcomed across the party. For a few hours it seemed as if a line had been drawn under the saga. Then Corbyn released a statement welcoming the recommendations, but insisting that the scale of antisemitism in the party had been ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons’ by the press and ‘our opponents inside and outside the party’. The party immediately suspended him. The move seems to have taken even Corbyn’s enemies by surprise; the left in the party was thrown into disarray. All sides fear a descent into another protracted civil war.
Perhaps that fear played on the minds of the NEC panel, composed of members from the party’s left and right, which unanimously reinstated Corbyn, after he had made a second, more acceptable statement, on 17 November. This episode has pleased precisely nobody: much of the party’s left adduced it as evidence of the new leadership’s intention to push them out of the party, while the failure to expel Corbyn has enraged those on the right who eagerly anticipated his removal. At the time of writing, though Starmer has readmitted Corbyn to the party, he has not restored the whip. This represents a truce, but like most truces it is uneasy, unstable and temporary.
Corbyn was not suspended on the recommendation of the EHRC; it has been made clear his initial statement on the report was the problem. But it remains unclear whether the party suspended Corbyn because it believed his statement to be antisemitic, or on the more general ground that he had brought the party into disrepute. If the former, then questions follow about why the party is dealing with the matter through a process just declared unfit for purpose by the EHRC. Some have suggested that even to mention media coverage or public perception in this context is to minimise antisemitism, but the report itself is careful to underline party members’ rights to freedom of opinion, discussion and dissent when it comes to considering the scale of antisemitism in the party. Critics of Corbyn’s position point to the report’s treatment of cases in which the minimisation of antisemitism is taken to constitute harassment (it is this aspect of Ken Livingstone’s behaviour, as part of his defence of remarks made by Naz Shah MP, on which the report dwells, rather than his more obviously offensive remarks about Hitler). As the socialist lawyer and writer David Renton points out, the Equalities Act sets a bar here: judges must consider not only the feeling of offence but whether that feeling is objectively reasonable.
Corbyn’s comment was not a denial that antisemitism exists within the party, but a claim that its prevalence has been overstated, and that the overstatement itself has had harmful effects and was employed for political ends. That is certainly an arguable claim, but – like the arguments against it – it is legitimate political speech. One might think his initial statement tin-eared, or that it wasn’t sufficiently reflective, or that it repeated his tic of mentioning antisemitism along with ‘other forms of racism’ as if it weren’t serious enough on its own terms, or did not take specific forms disanalogous to other racisms. But none of that can possibly justify Corbyn’s suspension, still less the suspension of members discussing it in their constituency parties.
If, as looks likely, the EHRC report itself is occluded by the controversy, it will be another missed opportunity. It offers a chance to think about the way antisemitism enters politics, and how to prevent its growth. A functional, trusted and interference-free disciplinary process is a necessary foundation, but isn’t in itself sufficient. The origins of antisemitism are not bureaucratic but political. The authors note the digital and social origin of many of the cases they reviewed: likes on social media, shared posts, status updates. It is possible to join the Labour Party – and loudly proclaim your membership – entirely digitally, without making any direct contact with the rest of the party, or having any opportunity for political education. Labour has, in any case, rarely taken the political education of its officials, let alone its members, as seriously as it should. Ceding the digital space to the conspiracy theorists populating Facebook groups risks letting a problem grow unseen. This is a challenge for political culture as a whole, whatever specific relevance it has for Labour. A perfect disciplinary process might catch every instance of offensive behaviour: a better strategy would seek to prevent them occurring in the first place.
The 2019 election occupies only a small portion of these books: although rumours occasionally escaped the office, few of those going door to door realised that Corbyn’s team had broken down, riven by Brexit, antisemitism and questions of basic strategy. In time, perhaps some of the details will come to seem bleakly comic: the treatment of the party’s communications ‘grid’ as a secret equivalent to the nuclear codes, kept even from high-ranking staff, is particularly farcical. In retrospect, the internal collapse of the project was nowhere more obvious than in the party’s policy conveyor belt: increasingly aware, in the words of the polling consultant Marcus Roberts, that ‘the soufflé wouldn’t rise twice,’ they attempted to replace organic enthusiasm with a blitzkrieg of pledges. It is a lesson that political tides cannot be generated – they can only be ridden.