Several Labour Party MPs have been suspended because of a toxic WhatsApp group chat where they had shared racist, sexist, homophobic, and antisemitic messages. One question that has come to light because of this, is whether Keir Starmer has failed to combat antisemitism in the Labour Party. This question, of course, assumes that this is what Starmer was attempting to do in the first place.
Systems theorist Stafford Beer famously coined the term that the purpose of a system is what it does. Starmer’s suspensions helped to obliterate the Labour left, with the antisemitic comments from the right wing of the party largely left unpunished, except for particularly egregious examples.
Rebecca Long-Bailey, a competitor with Starmer in the Labour leadership race and on the left of the Party, shared an interview with actor Maxine Pake where she claimed that Israeli secret services taught American police the tactic of neck kneeling used to murder George Floyd. This turned out to be untrue and she was suspended for sharing “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”
However, what is true is that American police have received instruction in Israel and Occupied Palestine, with police trained in crowd control, use of force, and surveillance, contributing to the terrible abuse of human rights exhibited by American police. It could be argued that Long-Bailey’s suspension was an overreaction, but one that happened to result in the removal from the party a rival to Starmer.
On the other hand, Steven Reed, a Starmer ally who resigned from Corbyn’s shadow cabinet in 2016 in protest of his leadership of the Labour Party, and is currently in Starmer’s Cabinet, put out a tweet describing Jewish businessman and Conservative donor, Richard Desmond, as a “puppet-master” – an antisemitic trope. All he had to do was apologise and delete the tweet, as well as mention he was a part of Labour Friends of Israel, of course.
What this shows is that the zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism that Starmer claims to be implementing in the Labour Party is very dependent on your usefulness to him, and whether the destruction of your public image, being branded as an antisemite, would be politically useful to him. Antisemitism still exists in the Labour Party because Starmer was not interested in zero tolerance for antisemitism, he was interested in purging the left.
“Keir Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn” by Jeremy Corbyn is licensed under CC BY 2.0.