The Labour Files

These are three long films made by Al Jazeera, on the strength of a huge data dump of Labour Party material. It’s complicated, but their basic case is that the accusations of anti-semitism against Labour were exploited to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. If this were your only access to information about current politics, you might assume that he was a martyred idealist, and that anti-semitism was never a problem.

It isn’t, of course, that simple, but they do make a powerful case. “Corbyn didn’t care about anti-semitism” - but when he took direct control of the process, the number of referrals, investigations and suspensions went up. And who exactly is being suspended? Many of them are Jewish, and their crime seems to be not so much anti-semitism, as criticism of Israel, and support for the Palestinians. We have been here before and why is it, at this moment when the Israel government is more right-wing and extreme than it has ever been, provoking widespread dissent from its own citizens, that the Labour Party has nothing to say?

There had to be a response to the data dump, and the allegations which followed it, and there was. The Frode Report loked into it, and has virtually been ignored. It said that there was an effective hierarchy of racism within the Labour Party, where anti-semitism mattered and disrcimination aganst Blacks or Muslims was seen as less important. Remind me, what’s happened about the implementation of the Williams report, seeking to put Windrush right?

There’s two scandals here. 1. What’s happened. 2. The failure of the mainstream media to report it. There’s this dynamite from Al Jazeera (including impressive detailed interviews with Labour Party members who’ve been sacked) sitting on YouTube, being ignored. If this is news to you, have a look.