The role of factionalism in the Labour Party

Now because Emilie Oldknow is a litigious waste of flesh, I should clarify that this is an summary which assumes the veracity of the report and no original claims about her will be made. Please mentally insert the word ‘allegedly’ before every assertion other than this one: that Emilie Oldknow is a litigious waste of flesh.

The report was written in conjunction with the EHRC report into antisemitism since the Governance and Legal Unit, called the GLU in this report, played a fairly major role in the continuation and publicity surrounding antisemitism in the labour party. The Labour party’s lawyers decided not to submit the report to the EHRC, so it was leaked instead.

The report starts by outlining the role played by the labour party staff, which is supposed to be akin to the role of the civil service of the state - as apolitical as possible. To put it politely, it quickly demonstrates the extent of the factionalism within the GLU and party apparatus generally.

Labour officials, including senior staff, expressed hostility towards Jeremy Corbyn and his staff, towards Labour MPs including Andy Burnham, Ed Miliband, Sadiq Khan, Emily Thornberry, Diane Abbott and Dawn Butler. Staff described “most of the PLP” as “Trots” or called them “totally useless” in 2015 for not having yet launched a coup against Corbyn. As one staff member commented, “everyone here considers anyone left of [Gordon] Brown to be a trot.”

One staff member is even said to have discussed “hanging and burning” Jeremy Corbyn.

The sabotage of Corbyn, and by extension, the party they were supposed to be impartial servants of, began immediately.

When Corbyn was elected staff discussed plans for a coup; one staffer said “we need a POLL - that says we’re like 20 points behind”; another suggested a silver lining for Remain losing the 2016 European referendum would be that Corbyn could be held responsible; and another hoped that poor performance in the May 2016 local elections would be the catalyst for a coup.

It continues in this vein for some time. Some key figures who were particularly upset whenever fortune favoured Corbyn, and anyone to the left of Gordon Brown, were Ian McNichol and Emilie Oldknow, with the latter running for General Secretary of the party under Starmer before the leak of this report.

This extent and fervor with which this factional war was fought is really illuminated by passages like this:

During the 2015 leadership election GLU and other Labour staff described their work as “hunting out 1000s of trots” and a “Trot hunt”, which included excluding people for having “liked” the Greens on Facebook. One prominent GLU staffer, Head of Disputes Katherine Buckingham, admitted that “real work is piling up” while she and other staff were engaged in inappropriate factional work.

As the report politely puts it:

Factional work appears to have come at the expense of work the staff were being paid to do, including … building and maintaining a functioning complaints process.

This section also reports various vile statements by Oldknow and others which should preclude them from membership of the party, let alone high office. Possibly the worst case is their discussion of a mentally ill young labour member with one saying they hope he dies in a fire, and another saying that they wouldn’t piss on him if he did.

I would like to focus on Oldknow for a moment, since she was tipped to be Starmer’s choice for General Secretary. If the report is accurate, her professional and personal conduct in her former role were execrable and it is a mystery as to why her name was even mentioned in connection with any senior role - let alone General Secretary. Whether this occurred through ignorance or indifference, it is not a good look.

It is noteworthy that the factional conflict described by the report is entirely waged by the Labour First types against the ’trots’ with whom they have become so pathologically obsessed that the word has lost all meaning.

Now, for the report, this is all just background information, merely setting the scene for everybody’s favourite story - antisemitism in the Labour party.

The standard approach to reports was as follows:

GLU often decided to conclude cases through informal solutions, without taking cases to the NEC. For example, they routinely decided that individuals should just be asked to delete their racist or otherwise offensive social media posts and apologise. In other cases they imposed suspensions and then lifted them shortly afterwards.

But they frequently bent rules for those they saw as factional allies, like Rod Liddle, who was known to be chummy with Tom Watson.

GLU also changed their policies to provide short-term fixes to political and factional problems and with little thought given to their long-term implications, which had a negative impact on their handling of some extreme cases of antisemitism and Islamophobia.

So the enforcement of what little policy existed, in whatever form it existed at the time, was very factional. Members were expelled from the party for retweeting Class War or liking Green Party posts. Meanwhile, Fleur Dunbar was making frequent antisemitic and islamophobic posts, including claiming that the “Rothschild’s killed Gadaffi” and that “ISIS was created to protect the Zionist entity”. In response to this particular case, Oldknow replies “It is a tricky one”.

Ms Dunbar would go on to make various bewildering posts, including saying the Jews needed to be put in camps for their betrayal, but they were well fed.

This kind of aggravating inaction and misplaced priorites would continue until Jennie Fornby took over.

There’s actually not all that much interesting to say about the process here - it was factional, amorphous and deliberately ineffective.

It’s actually not been obvious in what I’ve read of the report whether there was intent to create a media shitstorm, but it certainly had that effect. After all, who could pass up a chance like that? As David Graeber put it:

It’s the perfect accusation, because if you say this is a conspiracy, they will simply say ‘Aha! You believe in Jewish conspiracies’, right?

There’s almost no way you can reply to it which won’t make you yourself look anti-Semitic.

Now that we’ve discussed the main content of the report, and briefly mentioned the climate caused by antisemitism generally, it makes sense to me to go onto the current leadership’s response to it. It is not possible to imagine that Kier Starmer et al were unaware of its content before coming up with a potential candidate for General Secretary, making Oldknow’s consideration all the more surprising. It is also notable that no serious action has been taken against those named in the report - with McNichol - someone who is also heavily implicated, having stepped down volutarily after a period of inaction by the leadership.

The main concern of the leadership has been to investigate how the report leaked, and to this end, they’ve assembled a group of mostly Labour Peers to look into it. Quite why this investigation has been their priority over suspending those implicated is a mystery only to those with the most rose tinted spectacles.