It wasn't a scam, and that's official

Almost eight years since Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour Party leader, and nearly three years after the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published its report into antisemitism in the party, the last legal effort to overturn the EHRC’s finding that the Labour Party became so antisemitic under Corbyn that it broke equalities law has ended in failure.

This has come about because former London Mayor Ken Livingstone and former Labour councillor Pam Bromley have withdrawn their judicial review of the EHRC’s ruling that they had both made antisemitic statements. This was the central pillar of the EHRC’s ruling against the party, and the end of their judicial review means that this ruling now stands forever. It’s over.

You wouldn’t know it, though, from the reactions of Corbynites who insist that allegations of antisemitism under Corbyn’s leadership were invented, exaggerated or weaponised. The hashtag #ItWasAScam still trends on a regular basis whenever this issue returns to the news, and the true believers are convinced they have won a mighty victory against the EHRC even though the record shows the opposite is the case. It’s a fantasy of self-delusion wrapped in the martyrdom and conspiracies so beloved by this part of the hard left. It also tells us something important about the limitations of facts, evidence and the law in settling political disputes.

The EHRC report into antisemitism in Labour looked at a sample of 70 complaints and hung their verdict on the cases involving Livingstone and Bromley because they (a) made antisemitic statements and (b) were acting as representatives, or “agents”, of the party at the time, making the party legally liable. This is the EHRC’s key finding:

Our investigation found that the Labour Party breached the Equality Act 2010 by committing unlawful harassment through the acts of its agents in two of the complaints we investigated. These included using antisemitic tropes and suggesting that complaints of antisemitism were fake or smears. As these people were acting as agents of the Labour Party, the Labour Party was legally responsible for their conduct.

Some people have wrongly implied that this means the EHRC could only find two cases of antisemitism in total. That’s not correct: their report says they found plenty of evidence of “antisemitic conduct by an ‘ordinary’ member of the Labour Party”, but they were only looking for examples where the party was legally responsible.

The EHRC laid the blame for this squarely at Corbyn’s feet. Far from the report making “no criticism of Jeremy Corbyn”, as the distinguished KC Geoffrey Bindman claimed earlier this year, it has a chapter titled “A Failure of Leadership” that concludes:

It is hard not to conclude that antisemitism within the Labour Party could have been tackled more effectively if the leadership had chosen to do so.

The EHRC ruling was game-changing. This was the result of painstaking analysis by a statutory regulator of dozens of case files, a huge amount of documentary evidence, and submissions from Jewish and other organisations, party staff, whistle blowers and others. The outcome was an Unlawful Act Notice served against the Labour Party, with a two-year action plan of reform mandated to avoid legal sanctions. This should have ended the argument over whether complaints of widespread antisemitism in the Labour Party were well-founded or not, and for most observers that was the case. Not, though, for those people who cling to the belief that Corbyn was brought down by a conspiracy of Zionists, the Tory press, Blairites and the deep state.

It’s understandable, in a way. To accept that antisemitism did indeed become prevalent under Corbyn’s leadership would mean having to accept that anti-Israel politics sometimes act as a conduit for hatred of Jews. It would be to admit that a movement that prides itself as anti-racist was in fact harbouring the oldest hatred of all, and that all the adulation poured onto the leader of that movement was misplaced. Follow that thought to its logical conclusion and it invalidates the entire basis of Corbyn’s politics and therefore of their own.

Far easier to cling to the notion that the whole antisemitism crisis in Labour was a scam, and there is now a cottage industry of books, films, TV series and meetings dedicated to this idea. Like the cranky Holocaust deniers who take scrapings from the walls of the gas chambers at Auschwitz in an attempt to ‘prove’ that no poison gas was ever used there, they chip away at any part of the official narrative of Labour antisemitism that they think they can discredit.

Livingstone and Bromley’s legal action was meant to be the centrepiece of this effort, because the EHRC’s entire finding of unlawful discrimination by the Labour Party hung on their two cases. If the EHRC was wrong about Livingstone and Bromley, then it would follow that it was wrong about Labour, about Corbyn, about antisemitism, and everything that followed would have been an injustice. “This judicial review will be a vital step in correcting the record”, Livingstone announced back in October 2021.

Except the record remains exactly as it was. Under the settlement agreed by both sides, Livingstone and Bromley have withdrawn their claim, the EHRC report remains unchanged, and both sides will pay their own legal costs.

(I don’t know whether the recent news about Livingstone’s health played a role in their decision to withdraw the case, and I’m not going to speculate about it).

Bizarrely, Livingstone and Bromley’s supporters are calling this a win. Chris Williamson posted that they have been “vindicated”, Skwawkbox say the EHRC has been “discredited”, and the crowdfund that raised around £40,000 to support the failed case have called it a “victory”.

They seem to be basing this on the fact that the EHRC’s legal costs are higher than Livingstone and Bromley’s, but all this proves is that the EHRC’s lawyers worked more hours and/or charge a higher rate. Since both sides are paying their own costs, the relative scale of those costs has nothing to do with who won or lost.

An interesting aside is that, according to disgraced former Professor David Miller, the Left Legal Fighting Fund that backed this case is now supporting Miller’s own forthcoming employment tribunal against Bristol University. Miller is the sole director of the company that runs the Left Legal Fighting Fund, but he didn’t point this out in his tweet asking for donations.

It’s worth remembering what lay at the heart of the EHRC’s findings against Livingstone and Bromley. It felt utterly disorientating at the time, and is no less strange now, that Livingstone seemed so determined to connect Zionism and Nazism in every media interview that he managed to make an esoteric historical debate over the extent and nature of relations between German Zionists and the Nazi Party in the 1930s a live topic in contemporary British politics. All of a sudden there were people in Labour Party meetings all over the country who decided they were experts on the Haavara Agreement and felt a burning need to lecture their fellow party members about it. No wonder the EHRC found that Livingstone’s comments “had the effect of creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for members, and prospective members, of the Labour Party, particularly those who were Jewish.”

Pam Bromley is less well-known, but the EHRC found that one of her social media posts “used an obviously antisemitic trope, namely that Jewish people control the world’s financial system”. Other posts “suggested that Jewish people were engaged in a conspiracy for control of the Labour Party” and repeatedly claimed “that allegations of antisemitism were fabricated.” These ideas are antisemitic because they inevitably take the shape of a conspiracy theory alleging Jewish dishonesty, manipulation and subversion. They are now standard fare amongst the part of the left that refuses to take at face value the electorate’s failure in 2017 and 2019 to choose Corbyn as their next Prime Minister.

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It isn’t a coincidence that some of the people most keen to push the #ItWasAScam narrative about Labour antisemitism were also quick to question the serious allegations against Russell Brand (allegations that Brand strenuously denies). It’s the combination of instinctive distrust of any official narrative or mainstream media outlet, combined with a preference of what you want to believe over what is actually evidenced. Brand has constructed an image as an anti-establishment ‘truth’ teller seeking to expose and bring down the real wielders of behind-the-scenes power in our world. That’s exactly how peddlers of antisemitic conspiracy theories like to see themselves too, and the commonality in their way of thinking shows itself at times like this.

We’ve been here before, of course, because there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to antisemitism. The granddaddy of all antisemitic conspiracy theories is The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a hoax document written in Tsarist Russia at the turn of the 18th/19th centuries that claimed to reveal the secret Jewish plot to take over the world. It was ludicrous and implausible, but swept the world in the years after World War One (according to one estimate, in the two decades between the end of World War One and the outbreak of World War Two The Protocols outsold every other book on earth apart from the Bible).

The Protocols was thoroughly debunked, first by a journalist for The Times in 1921 (The Times having treated The Protocols as credible a year earlier) and then in a celebrated court case in Berne, Switzerland, in 1934-5. The Berne trial in particular laid out detailed evidence showing The Protocols to be a malicious forgery: “risible nonsense” was how the judge described it. That should have killed off The Protocols for good, but it didn’t because it was far too useful for people to care about whether it was true or not. It became a staple of Nazi propaganda against the Jews, even though Nazi leaders knew it was a fake:

… the Nazi propaganda leadership knew that The Protocols was not what it purported to be. But that seems not to have troubled them much. Whatever The Protocols was, it made for useful propaganda as long as one did not go into excessive detail.

That’s the thing about antisemitic conspiracy theories: they are too useful to dispense with just because they aren’t true. Most of the people spamming Jewish accounts on Twitter/X with the #ItWasAScam hashtag aren’t Nazis, but they cannot resist the comforting attraction of the idea that Corbyn failed because Zionists manufactured a load of fake antisemitism smears for the Tory press to deploy against him, rather than accepting that their own political movement became a safe harbour for antisemites. And no amount of evidence, legal rulings and failed court cases will outweigh their need to protect the ideological and political purity of the failed Corbyn project.