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Tom Watson, deputy leader of Britain’s opposition Labour party, said he was “chilled and appalled” by allegations in a BBC documentary that senior figures had interfered in internal investigations into anti-Semitism.
Mr Watson, a persistent critic of Jeremy Corbyn, party leader, said the “culture of permissiveness” over anti-Semitism inside Labour must be dealt with, and Mr Corbyn needed to take action. “Not only do I think he can fix it, he’s the only one who can,” he said.
Eight former Labour party officials — seven from its complaints unit — spoke to researchers from the BBC’s Panorama programme. They claimed there had been a big increase in complaints of anti-Semitism among party members since Mr Corbyn became leader in 2015, after which the membership nearly tripled to more than half a million.
The officials alleged there were substantial disagreements between Labour party headquarters and Mr Corbyn’s office about what constituted anti-Semitism, fuelling persistent tensions between the two.
One former staff member claimed that officials brought in by the party’s general secretary, Jennie Formby, “overruled” some of their disciplinary decisions over anti-Semitism and “downgraded” punishments to a “slap on the wrist”.
Some of the officials said they had been left in despair. Sam Matthews, the party’s former head of disputes, told Panorama: “I actively considered committing suicide . . . as some way not to feel trapped any more.”
Mr Matthews told the Jewish Chronicle on Thursday that he believed Mr Corbyn had done more than anyone in modern political history to bring about the rise of anti-Semitism. “Whether he himself is an anti-Semite or not is an irrelevance.”
Ephraim Mirvis, the UK’s chief rabbi, said the report should be a “watershed” moment for Labour. “This is no longer a question of the leadership’s inability to deal with the scourge of anti-Semitism, but of its direct complicity in it,” he said in a statement posted on Twitter. “The cloud of hatred and acrimony that this creates must be lifted from our politics and from our society.”
Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, said the programme showed why the party needed to continue its co-operation with an investigation into the party by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. “It breaks my heart that Jewish Labour members will have watched Panorama and felt that there is no place in the Labour party for them,” he said.
Labour denied that the leader’s office had inappropriately intervened in disciplinary cases. The party described the former staff as “disaffected officials who have always opposed Corbyn’s leadership, worked to actively undermine it and have both personal and political axes to grind”. It called the programme “politically one-sided” and “seriously inaccurate”.
The party said the BBC had failed to make a “proper and serious attempt” to understand its new, improved procedures for dealing with anti-Semitism. “Since Jennie Formby became general secretary (in March 2018) the rate at which anti-Semitism cases have been dealt with has increased more than fourfold,” it said.
Allies of Mr Corbyn have themselves accused former party staffers of being too slow to deal with anti-Semitism accusations.
But Mr Watson said the former staff on Panorama “showed great courage to speak out the way they did”.
The EHRC launched a formal investigation in May to examine whether the Labour party has “unlawfully discriminated against, harassed or victimised people because they are Jewish”. The organisation has also begun a preliminary probe into complaints about Islamophobia within the Conservative party.
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