Police make three arrests over secret internal Labour Party antisemitic hate dossier following report by CAA
The Metropolitan Police Service has made three arrests over a secret internal dossier of Labour Party antisemitism, which was reported by Campaign Against Antisemitism to Commissioner Cressida Dick live on LBC radio.
Two men in their 50s were arrested as well as a woman in her 70s, all on suspicion of incitement to racial hatred, which is a very serious criminal offence.
The three are understood to have been expelled from the Labour Party after the Party learned on LBC that its secret dossier had been reported to the police by CAA live on air.
The dossier contains over eighty pages of antisemitic hatred by Labour Party members, including Holocaust denial and threats to harm Jewish Labour MPs. Some of the perpetrators admitted to the Party that they were behind some of the hatred chronicled in the dossier, which is just one of many dossiers compiled by the Party’s internal Compliance Unit for consideration by the Party’s Disputes Panel. The panel is currently chaired by Claudia Webb, who defended Ken Livingstone and claimed that the “combined machinery of state, political and mainstream elite” are conspiring to smear Jeremy Corbyn with “false allegations”.
The secret dossier is believed to be just one of several compiled by the Labour Party’s Compliance Unit, though all but one of the original researchers in the unit have now left, with at least one of them publicly voicing their disgust at attitudes towards antisemitism.
After joining LBC to discuss the dossier, Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Chairman, Gideon Falter, waited until the Metropolitan Police Commissioner appeared live on LBC later that day, calling in to her call-in programme and reporting the dossier to her on air.
The secret internal dossier contains over eighty pages of antisemitic hatred by Labour Party members, including numerous admissions of guilt, but the Labour Party kept the dossier secret and did not even tell Jewish Labour MPs who were directly threatened within it, despite police considering threats to their safety to be so severe as to warrant special police protection. It is absolutely right that police officers have opened a criminal investigation, which we hope will encompass both the antisemitic hate crimes and the Labour Party’s complicity by concealing its evidence. Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite under whose leadership the once fiercely anti-racist Labour Party has become institutionally antisemitic and an existential threat to British Jews.
We are pleased that three arrests have been made, but many more are now needed, both of individuals whose offences are detailed in the secret Labour Party dossier and of those who continue to incite hatred against Jews online.
The Equality and Human Rights 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.
