Lord Falconer says that Labour’s actions look “frighteningly like” institutional antisemitism
Labour peer Lord Falconer, who the Labour Party’s leaders had controversially considered putting in charge of another “independent” review of Labour’s handling of disciplinary cases of antisemitism, has joined the litany of current and former Labour figures saying that the Party’s actions on antisemitism could render it institutionally antisemitic.
Campaign Against Antisemitism declared the Labour Party to be “institutionally antisemitic” back in 2016, followed by other Jewish community charities two years later.
Invoking the words used by the landmark 1999 Macphereson into institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police Service, Lord Falconer told the Jewish News: “Can antisemitism be detected in the Party’s processes, attitudes or behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping? Looks frighteningly like it as every day goes by.”
Lord Falconer’s warning came after the Sunday Times published pages of analysis and details of a leaked hard drive of e-mails and documents and a secret recording of a meeting between Jeremy Corbyn and Campaign Against Antisemitism’s honorary patron, Dame Margaret Hodge, which have proven once and for all that Mr Corbyn and his team have intervened in hundreds of antisemitism cases in the Labour Party whilst lying that they would “never” interfere.
Last month, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, who served as Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary from 2003 to 2007 and was a flatmate of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, said that he would not conduct a review of Labour’s handling of disciplinary cases of antisemitism after the Equalities and Human Rights Commission stepped in.
The Commission has begun pre-enforcement proceedings against the Labour Party following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant. The pre-enforcement proceedings are a precursor to opening a full statutory investigation.
In recent months, eleven MPs have resigned from the Labour Party over antisemitism.
Yesterday, marked the one year anniversary since over 2,000 Jews and non-Jews alike converged from across the UK for a national demonstration outside Labour Party Head Office in London organised by Campaign Against Antisemitism. The rally demanded that the Labour Party hold Mr Corbyn to account over his failure to tackle antisemitism in the Party. We received 1,025 disciplinary complaints from the demonstrators which we handed over to the Labour Party. A year later, they have still not investigated these complaints.
Almost 50,000 people have now signed our petition denouncing Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite and declaring him “unfit to hold any public office”.
