Introduction

1. We are members of the Riverside CLP in Liverpool. Some of us have been members for many years, one for over forty years, and some of us have joined or re-joined within the last year.
2. Most of us have been involved in anti-racist activities for many years.
3. We are writing this submission to express our outrage at the current witch-hunt against honest members of the Party, many of long standing with a proven and honourable record of anti-racism.
4. Accusations are not being made in good faith, nor in isolation, and are motivated by a number of ambitions. The first is to undermine the party’s leadership and to obstruct the progress Labour has made since the last General Election. A longer-term motive is to prevent the Labour Party from supporting the cause of the Palestinians by making Palestine issues ‘too difficult to discuss’ for fear of being accused of racism.
5. The complaints are accompanied by a campaign for an illogical amendment to the Party’s disciplinary rule-book; we discuss this below.
6. It is Labour's position on Palestine that is fundamentally at issue in this debate.

Racism and antisemitism

7. Antisemitism, being the oldest form of British racism, is buried deep within our culture. Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale is just one example of many from literature, and there is a hostile reference to Jews in Magna Carta. England was the pioneer of antisemitic pogroms against the Jewish community, in York in the thirteenth century. Antisemitism has a particularly strong history within the British establishment, which for years excluded Jews from higher positions in society.
8. At street level, antisemitism has routinely accompanied other forms of racism. Fascists chose to march through Cable Street in 1936 as it was part of a significant Jewish community.
9. The labour movement has been at its best when it stands up against racism and fascism. To give one example, our local trades council minutes from the early 1900s contain several expressions of support for the 'Hebrew cabinet-makers' in their various labour disputes.
10. Our own experience is that the Labour Party has been a relatively safe environment for all those communities who suffer discrimination or abuse because of race, religion or sexual orientation. Inevitably, from time to time clumsy expressions will reflect a more deep-seated racism in society at large, but for the most part our Party and members are at the forefront of challenging backward attitudes, including antisemitism.
11. So antisemitism should be challenged whenever it rears its head. However, today there are more prevalent forms of racism in British society, as the Pew Poll of 2014 shows. The poll shows hostility towards Jews at 7%, whilst hostility towards Muslims (26%) and Roma (50%) is far higher. See Pew Research Center Survey
12. It appears to us that there are far more glaring examples of racism in our political culture than those firing the present 'anti-semitism' witch-hunt. Boris Johnson’s comments on Obama, or Zac Goldsmith’s racist election campaign against Sadiq Khan, for example. Why the attack on the Labour Party, and why antisemitism?

Labour and Zionism

13. The project known as Zionism was to set up a separate homeland for Jewish people. The idea began to circulate at the end of the 19th century and was articulated in successive conferences. Many Jewish people, then as now, fundamentally disagreed with it, saying quite rightly that Jewish people were part of their home national communities and should not have to emigrate to achieve security.
14. The tradition of Labour and socialist support for oppressed minorities was all too easily channelled into support for a state of Israel. It appeared to many that a separate 'Jewish homeland' would be an answer to the persecution of the 1930s and early 1940s. Socialists whose forbears opposed the Enclosure Acts and the subjugation of the Irish could not or would not see that the state of Israel would be established through massacres and ethnic cleansing. This was a culpable failure, as Britain had administered a League of Nations mandate in Palestine for over 20 years. Those who served in the Army in Palestine or in the pre-1948 Palestine police force well knew the impact of Jewish insurgents (who today would rightly be called 'terrorists').
15. The subsequent expansionism of Israel has caused many to think again. A state that incorporates race into its definition of citizenship is by definition racist. The creation of hundreds of thousands of refugees, the discrimination within Israel itself, the apartheid system of the West Bank (separate housing, separate roads, separate legal systems etc) and the ongoing siege of Gaza have convinced many that it is the Palestinians whom they should support.
16. In recent years the pro-Israel position of the Labour Party has begun to change. The current wave of complaints about antisemitism is a direct and desperate response to that change.

Witch-hunts past and present

17. We have been here before, of course, with some of the same protagonists. In 2011 the University and College Union had to defend a tribunal application brought by one of its members, a Mr R Fraser. Prominent witnesses in his support were Jeremy Newmark (now of the Jewish Labour Movement) and Labour MPs Denis MacShane and John Mann. The tribunal in a lengthy reserved judgment of March 2013 (case 2203290/2011) made short work of their evidence (see paragraph 148) and dismissed every one of the complaints.
18. The present round of claims that antisemitism has increased within the Labour Party is in a similar vein. The dispute over the Oxford University Labour Club attracted massive publicity. Alex Chalmers, the co-chair of that club, resigned his position over what he claimed was antisemitic behaviour in 'a large proportion' of members. His claim was taken up and amplified by Labour MPs John Mann and Louise Ellman. But all that had happened was that the club had endorsed Oxford’s Israeli Apartheid Week, an annual awareness-raising exercise by student groups which support Palestinian rights. Chalmers, it turned out, had worked for the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), a leading pro-Israel lobby group. The Royall report found no evidence of antisemitism in the Labour Club.
19. Other charges made against Party members appear to us to be either plain false, or based on no more than an unfortunate turn of phrase or slip of the tongue. Naz Shah MP, for example, re-tweeted in 2014 (at the height of Israel's last invasion of Gaza) a tongue-in-cheek cartoon from the website of noted Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein. The cartoon makes the point that Israel could not survive without US support and so suggests it would be better located in that country. For John Mann to compare her action with Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the final solution, is ludicrous and disturbing and indeed worthy of censure in its own right.
20. At the heart of these complaints is an attempt to conflate the words Zionist and Jewish, and, flowing from that, the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. This is again an attempt to make it very difficult to speak out against the decades-long, systematic discrimination of the Israeli state. It is an attempt to silence.
21. A similar motive lies behind the suggestion that the Jewish Labour Movement provide advice and training on issues of antisemitism. This group is affiliated to the World Zionist Movement and clearly allied to Israel and the pro-Israel lobby. There are other Jewish groups, like JBIG, Jews for Justice and Peace in Palestine, Freespeechonisrael, and our local group, Merseyside Jews for Peace and Justice who should at least have an equal presence and say.

Taking MacPherson’s name in vain

22. Alongside the attempts to smear and expel Party members goes an attempt to change the rulebook. A proposal is circulating to amend the disciplinary procedure to include this gem: “Where a member is responsible for a hate incident, being defined as something which the victim or anyone else (sic) think (sic) was motivated by hostility or prejudice based on disability, race, religion, transgender identity or sexual orientation, the NEC may have the right to impose the appropriate disciplinary options ...” The explanatory text accompanying this proposal suggests that it ‘gives due regard’ to the MacPherson definition of a racist incident.
23. As happened in the UCU tribunal (see paragraph 148 again) the ground-breaking report of Lord MacPherson is being woefully misinterpreted. MacPherson was not rewriting the criminal law of the land, he was issuing guidance to police investigators. Police officers are directed not to write off claims that incidents are racist and are required to take the view of a victim as a starting-point. But it remains the function of a court of law to form its own view whether an offence is racially aggravated or not. The NEC cannot delegate its judgment to the victim of an incident, let alone to ‘the victim or anyone else’.
24. David Feldman’s sub-report to the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism puts it like this:

    It is sometimes suggested that when Jews perceive an utterance or action to be anti-Semitic that this is how it should be described. In the UK this claim looks for support to the 1999 Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, written by Lord Macpherson of Cluny. There Macpherson wrote that ‘a racist incident’ is “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.” If we look at the context in which this quotation appears, it is unambiguously clear Macpherson intended to propose that such racist incidents require investigation. He did not mean to imply that such incidents are necessarily racist. However, Macpherson’s report has been misinterpreted and misapplied in precisely this way. Its authority has been thrown behind the view that such incidents should, by definition, be regarded as racist. In short, a definition of antisemitism which takes Jews’ feelings and perceptions as its starting point and which looks to the Macpherson report for authority is built on weak foundations. (our emphasis)

The disciplinary process

25. We are concerned that the Party has been suspending some members without telling them how long they are suspended for, what they are supposed to have done, or who is accusing them.
26. It is completely out of order for Ken Livingstone, whose anti-racist stance over decades is a matter of public record, to have been forced to give up his place on the National Executive Committee simply because there has been no timetable set for his disciplinary procedure.
27. The Party's civil service has been swift to suspend and content to leave members in limbo. Are false accusers, if and when they are exposed, to be suspended, pending investigation?

The Liverpool experience

(There follow some paragraphs concerning the affairs of Liverpool Riverside CLP which - at present - are internal to the party and not in the public domain)

28. These experiences mean we know all too well how the charge of antisemitism is being used to bully and silence. We hope that your investigation restores a sense of proportion to the Palestine debate and gives the Party some guidance as to its disciplinary procedures in future.

For open, respectful debate in the Labour Party!
Anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism!

John Airs
John Davies
Alison Down
Jeremy Hawthorn
David Hookes
Helen Marks
Joel Murray
Audrey White

5 June 2016