An extensive internal investigation into the way Labour handled antisemitism complaints will not be submitted to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, after an intervention by party lawyers.
The 860-page report, concluded that factional hostility towards Jeremy Corbyn amongst former senior officials contributed to “a litany of mistakes” that hindered the effective handling of the issue.
The investigation, which was completed in the last month of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, claims to have found “no evidence” of antisemitism complaints being treated differently to other forms of complaint, or of current or former staff being “motivated by antisemitic intent”.
Instead, the report concludes that there was a lack of “robust processes, systems, training, education and effective line management” and found “abundant evidence of a hyper-factional atmosphere prevailing in Party HQ” towards Jeremy Corbyn which “affected the expeditious and resolute handling of disciplinary complaints.”.
As well as 10,000 separate emails, the dossier uncovers thousands of private WhatsApp communications between former senior party officials and singles out for criticism some who gave whistleblower evidence to last year’s highly-critical BBC Panorama investigation on antisemitism within Labour.
These include the former General Secretary Lord McNicol and the former acting head of the governance and legal unit, Sam Matthews.
“This report completely blows open everything that went on”
“We were being sabotaged and set up left right and centre by McNicol’s team and we didn’t even know. It’s so important that the truth comes out”, the source added.
The report claims private communications show senior former staff “openly worked against the aims and objectives of the leadership of the Party, and in the 2017 general election, some key staff even appeared to work against the Party’s core objective of winning elections”.
The report says the WhatsApp communications in question, which included some of the most senior figures in the party headquarters and Lord McNicol’s office, were leaked by one of the group’s members.
The examples from chat archives published in the document include:
- Conversations in 2017 which appear to show senior staff preparing for Tom Watson to become interim leader in anticipation of Jeremy Corbyn losing the election
- Conversations which it is claimed show senior staff hid information from the leader’s office about digital spending and contact details for MPs and candidates during the election
- Conversations on election night in which the members of the group talk about the need to hide their disappointment that Mr. Corbyn had done better than expected and would be unlikely to resign
- A discussion about whether the grassroots activist network Momentum could be ‘proscribed’ for being a ‘party within a party’
- A discussion about ‘unsuspending’ a former Labour MP who was critical of Jeremy Corbyn so they could stand as a candidate in the 2017 election
- A discussion about how to prevent corbyn-ally Rebecca Long-Bailey gaining a seat on the party’s governing body in 2017
- Regular references to corbyn-supporting party staff as “trots”
- Conversations between senior staff in Lord McNicol’s office in which they refer to former director of communications Seamus Milnes as “dracula”, and saying he was “spiteful and evil and we should make sure he is never allowed in our Party if it’s last thing we do”
- Conversations in which the same group refers to Mr. Corbyn’s former chief of staff Karie Murphy as “medusa”, a “crazy woman” and a “bitch face cow” that would “make a good dartboard”
- A discussion in which one of the group members expresses their “hope” that a young pro-Corbyn Labour activist, who they acknowledge had mental health problems, “dies in a fire”
The investigation also accuses the former General Secretary Lord McNicol, and other senior figures of providing “false and misleading information” to Jeremy Corbyn’s office in relation to the handling of antisemitism complaints, which the report claims meant “the scale of the problem was not appreciated” by the leadership.
The report has yet to be made available to the public.
However we have all of the evidence:
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