Must watch to set context:
(PART 1 of condensed report, first draft)
In the period until spring 2018 (before Jennie Formby became General Secretary), the Labour Party’s investigation shows that Labour HQ and GLU failed to develop any consistent system for logging and recording complaints or logging and recording disciplinary investigations and tracking their progress. They also failed to develop any consistent system, process or training for investigating and progressing cases or any general guidance or training for staff on decision-making regarding complaints, including antisemitism complaints. They failed to develop any detailed or coherent guidelines for investigating complaints based on social media conduct or how to identify Labour members and how to handle different forms of social media activity. They also did not recommend or enact any reforms to the NEC and NCC disciplinary procedures, so they might be fit for purpose given the massively increased size of the membership and expected increase in caseload, as a result. They also failed to log and investigate complaints of racism as racism.
The report makes clear that very few complaints were therefore passed on to the Head of Disputes, Sam Matthews and he then chose to simply sit on them. In fact it states that Matthews would only be prompted into action when chased up by other staff members. The report continues that despite their incompetence and arguably deliberate inaction, senior GLU and GSO staff, including the then General Secretary, Iain McNicol, repeatedly claimed that all complaints were being dealt with promptly, justified delays and claimed that outstanding issues would be dealt with soon. Timetables for case resolutions were never met, they falsely claimed to have processed all antisemitism complaints and that most of the antisemitism complaints were not about Labour members and then provided highly inaccurate statistics of antisemitism complaintsThe report also states that “the GLU when under the management of Sam Matthews, John Stolliday and Emilie Oldknow provided false and misleading information to both the Leader of the Oppositions Office and the General Secretary” and by the time Jennie Formby took over as General Secretary, in April 2018, there was a sizeable backlog of cases that had been sat on for years as well as “a hidden backlog of people reported to GLU for antisemitism, but never dealt with or mishandled”.
The report then speaks of “abundant evidence of a hyper-factional atmosphere prevailing in Party HQ” before Jennie Formby was appointed Gen Sec. and states that this “affected the expeditious and resolute handling of disciplinary complaints.” GLU staff and senior staff with responsibility for managing and overseeing GLU, it says, “were bitterly opposed to the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn” and appeared to be “largely interested in work that could advance a factional agenda.” The report concludes that some employees took a view that “the worse things got for Labour the happier they would be, since this might expedite Jeremy Corbyn’s departure from office.”
Contrary to the propaganda alleging that the leader’s office was influencing how anti-Semitism cases were being handled, the report states that the evidence shows that “staff in HQ, including in GLU and GSO, did not take instruction from LOTO. On the contrary, they often 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.”
Interestingly the report adds that another issue was that GLU staff at the time didn’t fully understand “what constitutes antisemitism and on what warrants suspension from the Party” and sometimes incorrectly sought “informal resolutions” for serious cases of antisemitism. They apparently ignored the guidelines laid out in the Chakrabarti Report, released on 30 June 2016. These issues, it says, have now been dealt with and this has significantly improved the process and speed of action. Members found expressing anti-Semitic views can now be “expelled within days or weeks of the complaint being submitted to the Party.”
The report then goes on to explain that due to the nature and volume of information requested by the EHRC, the party had to allocate a great deal of staff time to handle the request, not least because many of the GLU staff concerned had left the department prior to 2019. The current GLU staff therefore had to use Labour’s “Subject Access Request” tool – which does a back-end search of all Labour Party emails in order to find the information requested in a chronological fashion. This also provided the party with information it needed to understand what had gone wrong in the past and how to improve practices. That said, the report admits that “former staff left almost no records when they stopped working for the party, resulting in a lack of institutional memory from this period”, which is why, they say “a wider investigation was required.”
The Party email system, it turns out, proved to be a helpful resource because it included all emails sent or received by Party staff throughout this period and, of the several million emails, an estimated 100,000 emails were reviewed by staff for this investigation. Staff were also able to search thousands of messages exchanged on Labour work accounts, on an internal party messaging service, using the Subject Access Request tool. Staff also had access to “two staff WhatsApp group chats established by senior management in Labour HQ for work purposes – “SMT Group” and “LP Forward Planning Group”, both established on 28 September 2016.” The contents of these WhatsApp chats were made available to the Labour Party by one of the groups’ members.
Members of “SMT Group”…
Iain McNicol (General Secretary)
Tracey Allen (Manager, GSO)
Julie Lawrence (Director, GSO)
Emilie Oldknow (Executive Director – Governance, Membership and Party Services)
Patrick Heneghan (Executive Director – Elections, Campaigns and Organisation)
Simon Mills (Executive Director – Finance).
Members of “LP Forward Planning Group”…
Iain McNicol (General Secretary)
Tracey Allen (Manager, GSO)
Julie Lawrence (Director, GSO)
Emilie Oldknow (Executive Director – Governance, Membership and Party Services)
Patrick Heneghan (Executive Director – Elections, Campaigns and Organisation)
Simon Mills (Executive Director – Finance).
John Stolliday (Director, Governance and Legal)
Mike Creighton (Director of Audit, Risk and Property)
Claire-Frances Fuller (Head of Internal Governance)
Simon Jackson (Director of Policy, Research and Messaging, Briefing and Rebuttal)
Fiona Stanton (Regional Director, Labour North)
Neil Fleming (Acting Head of Press and Broadcasting)
Carol Linforth (Director of Conference and Events)
Sarah Mulholland (PLP Secretary)
Holly Snyman (Director – Human Resources)
Greg Cook (Head of Political Strategy)
Anna Hutchinson (Regional Director, Labour North West)
Tom Geldard (Director of Digital).Seumas Milne also exported and forwarded staff the chat contents of another WhatsApp group, established by McNicol and Oldknow as a work tool to aid communication on 26 January 2017 (final message was sent on 7 April 2018). This group included 4 individuals…
Iain McNicol
Emilie Oldknow
Karie Murphy (Chief of Staff, LOTO)
Seumas Milne (Executive Director – Strategy and Communication)
The report makes a bold statement quite early on…
“It became apparent over the course of this investigation that the factional role played by GLU and other senior Labour HQ staff was not incidental to understanding GLU’s work in this period – it was fundamental.”
It then adds that this factionalism played a prominent role in the “Validation” process during the 2016 leadership election, when thousands of supporters of Jeremy Corbyn were suspended or excluded from the Party. It references two case studies that showed such factional use of disciplinary processes continued well into spring 2018 and showed how the GLU and Labour HQ were openly hostile towards the Leader of the Opposition’s office (LOTO), preventing them from exercising any effective oversight of the work the GLU or Labour HQ were doing. It further adds that, between 2015 to early 2018, the GLU and Labour HQ was so preoccupied with the factionalised membership “Validation” process that disciplinary procedures were neglected. To be clear, the report states that they were “dysfunctional, slow and flexible to the factional requirements of staff.” They made “highly inconsistent, and often poor, decisions on anti-Semitism complaints” and “failed to act on the vast majority of antisemitism complaints submitted in this period” As another example of factionalism the report points out that “consultation with LOTO on a range of cases was normal conduct under Ed Miliband, but largely stopped when Jeremy Corbyn became leader” and whenever LOTO staff chased action on antisemitism from GLU and Labour HQ, they were frequently met with hostile or obstructive response.The report states that, having considered the evidence, it became clear that “Much of the Labour Party machinery from 2015-18 was openly opposed to Jeremy Corbyn, and worked to directly undermine the elected leadership of the party.”It continues.. “The priority of staff in this period appears to have been furthering the aims of a narrow faction aligned to Labour’s right rather than fulfilling the organisation’s objectives, from winning elections to building a functioning complaints and disciplinary process.”Staff refused to obey secret directives from the leader’s office. Instead they chose to pursue their own political agenda, working to remove anyone who supported Jeremy Corbyn and actively “hindering the leader’s campaign in the 2017 General Election”. One comment from a senior staff member summed up the general attitude “death by fire is too kind for LOTO”. As well as Jeremy Corbyn and his staff, some officials, even senior GLU staff, were also hostile toward other Labour MPs including Andy Burnham, Ed Miliband, Sadiq Khan, Emily Thornberry, Diane Abbott and Dawn Butler and even described “most of the PLP” as “Trots” and referred to them as “totally useless” because they’d not launched a coup against Corbyn immediately after he’d been elected leader in 2015. One staff member would later comment, “everyone here considers anyone left of [Gordon] Brown to be a trot.”
Abusive and inappropriate language was normal when referring to Corbyn, other MPs, Labour members and even other staff. Staff discussed “hanging and burning”Jeremy Corbyn. They referred to him as a “lying little toerag” and remarked that any Labour MP who nominated Corbyn for the ballot “deserves to be taken out and shot”. Another commented how one particular staff member who had whooped during Corbyn’s speech “should be shot”, while senior staff members hoped a certain party member on the left of the party “dies in a fire”. The report actually states that Senior Labour staff reserved language that was even more abusive and inappropriate than this when referring to many of the Labour members they were suspending, simply for wanting to support Jeremy Corbyn in 2016.As it became apparent that Corbyn was going to win the 2015 leadership election as discussion quickly ensued around how they could actually cancel the election. When that failed they immediately switched to planning a coup. One staff member remarked “we need a POLL – that says we’re like 20 points behind” and another suggested spinning it so that Corbyn took the blame for the Remain campaign losing the 2016 referendum. Others hoped for a poor performance in the May 2016 local elections so they could blame Corbyn and push for yet another coup.Staff actually discussed “coming into the office & doing nothing for a few months”and even joked about “hardly working” during the 2017 general election. They even created a chat group so they could pretend to work and look busy but were really only chatting to each other. During the election, senior staff refused to share even the most basic information with the leader’s office. In fact, they couldn’t even get contact details for the candidates. Labour HQ even set up “a secret key seats team” in the London office to exclusively support right wing MPs and then committed most of their time and resources to that campaign instead of the official general election campaign being run by the leadership’s office, whose aim was to win the election and get Labour into government.One senior staff member stated that if it was a choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May they’d vote for Theresa May. Others remarked that they hoped Labour suffered an embarrassing defeat, while senior staff wished for bad polling results so they could watch “Andrew Neil rip [Jeremy Corbyn] to pieces” but then dismayed as Corbyn started to pull massive rallies and the polls started to narrow significantly, even remarking how it made them “feel ill”. Then, when it became apparent that the Labour election campaign had proven to be extremely successful and the exit polls were predicting a hung parliament, senior officials, including Iain McNicol and Emilie Oldknow, discussed how to hide their disappointment, suggesting “everyone needs to smile”and “be upbeat. And not show it”. However, Oldknow couldn’t stomach the fact that some MPs were congratulated Corbyn after the election (including Yvette Cooper) and described them as “grovelling and embarrassing”.Within weeks of the general election being called and as early as January 2017, Iain McNicol, Emilie Oldknow and other senior staff were planning for another Labour leadership election. They were hoping that Labour would lose the Copeland and Stoke-on-trent by-elections and trigger another contest. Iain McNicol discussed it with Tom Watson and told him “to prepare for being interim leader”. The Director of GLU, John Stolliday, drew up the plans and attempted to change the rules in order to replace the ‘one member one vote system’ with an ‘Electoral College system’ in order to guarantee there would never have another left wing candidate. Stolliday, who refers to himself as a political fixer, talked about overhauling selections of parliamentary candidates and overturning CLP AGM results in order to help the right of the Party, while Emilie Oldknow and other GLU staff discussed keeping Angela Eagle’s CLP suspended, at Eagle’s request, to give her team more time to organise against left-wing members before their AGM. GLU Staff also discussed organising NEC Youth Representative Elections on a different election cycle to other NEC elections, to ensure a left-wing candidate would not win and noted that this was signed off by GLU’s Director. One GLU staff commented that Emilie Oldknow expecting them to “fabricate a case” against people “she doesn’t like/her friends don’t like”. Some referred to their work as “hunting out 1000s of trots” or going on a “Trot hunt”. Even ‘liking’ the Greens on a Facebook page was enough to make you a target. Head of Disputes, Katherine Buckingham, even admitted that the “real work is piling up” while she and other GLU staff were engaged in inappropriate factional work.
Factional loyalty also meant that people were being recruited to the GLU team, or appointed to senior roles, who simply didn’t have the appropriate qualification which, of course, also impacted the GLU’s ability to build a functioning disciplinary process for years. Factional work even took priority over the work the staff were being paid to do.
The report makes it clear that the leader’s office had absolutely no authority or influence over the GLU or the party machinery.
Why hasn’t this been put on general release? Especially after the Forde Report has been repeatedly thrown into the long grass.