 Yesterday was the joint conference between the Jewish Labour movement and Labour friends of Israel in the wake of the EHRC report into Labour and anti-Semitism and the suspension of the whip from Corbyn, this was closely watched especially as big names including Keir Starmer and Angela Reiner were in attendance. It was Reiner who got the biggest headline from the day stating that and I quote, if I have to suspend thousands of thousands of members we will do that and we will not accept an injury to one because an injury to one is an injury to all. That's what we say in our movement, she goes on. It's about education as well, it's about having this approach where we don't accept that people, you know, we have debates but there's no debating what the EHRC said. There's no debating whether anti-Semitism exists in the Labour Party, it does and we've got to do everything we can to stamp it out. I mean there's a number of problems with this, first of all if you're the deputy leader of the Labour Party standing up and saying I will suspend thousands of thousands of members if I need to is not quite the right approach. One the EHRC has specifically said that you need to depoliticise these issues so if she's suggesting that she personally has gone to suspend thousands of thousands of people I think that would probably fall foul of the recommendations from the report from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. More than that though, it has all the features of so much of this debate which is to make their point stronger, Labour politicians essentially have to completely twist what Labour members are actually doing. So Angela Rainer there is saying we can't debate what the EHRC said. Now for one, I think people can, I think this idea that a report gets released and suddenly it's a taboo to even question what is within it is bizarre. I think it's very authoritarian, it's almost, you know, as if you're sort of in the Catholic Church in the 16th century or something. But I can understand why you might say there shouldn't be debates in CLP meetings, in local parties about the EHRC or whether or not to accept it. I can see why that would be an unstrategic thing to do or potentially an ill-advised thing to do, but no one is doing that. Of the motions I've seen in CLPs, people are generally accepting the EHRC recommendations but saying that they don't want the former leader to have the whip suspended from them when it's unclear why. So instead of her standing up and saying, you know, we shouldn't have members debating whether or not Cormage would have the whip, which is a much weaker argument, she has to make up that they're doing something that they're not. We also aren't having people debating whether or not antisemitism exists in the Labour Party at all. None of the motions I've seen suggest that. So, I mean, there might be one or two people in the hundreds of thousands of members who in a meeting have said something along those lines. But the idea that that would lead to thousands and thousands of people being suspended, she is basically implying that thousands and thousands of Labour members are saying stuff in meetings that they're not saying. Which, I mean, it's the sign of a weak argument, isn't it, when people have to essentially make things up. And I do think there's a moral problem really if you're in a leadership position in a political organisation and you make up stuff about the members who work hard for your re-election. Stammer, also, for his part, made some interventions which I thought were pretty weak. So, these are tweets from Sienna Rogers who was at the online conference. She tweeted, quoting Keir Stammer, we're only in this place because of Jeremy's response to the commission. We've been set back by what Jeremy did in response to the commission. He adds, I want to get that focus back on where it needs to be, away from individuals. Now, the reason why I think this is pretty weak is because the reason we are discussing individuals, not the issues, is because he decided to suspend Jeremy Corbyn for saying something which is perfectly within his right to say it was ill-advised and to say, I'm disappointed Jeremy Corbyn said that. Fine, he can say that. But if you suspend the former leader for saying something which is potentially ill-advised but essentially true, then, of course, you're going to have a big, big row about one individual. That's what's happening now. If you stood to unite the party and now you have suspended the previous leader who still has a great amount of support within the party in question, what did you think was going to happen? That is the thing that has made people have what I think is an absolutely necessary debate about the reinstating of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour whip. So to now stand back and say, oh, why are we so obsessed with an individual? The reason people are obsessed with an individual is because you suspended them on very, very weak pretenses. Some people are saying we should stop talking so much about Corbyn's suspension and the HRC report. We should talk about policies. But I do think that what we're seeing here is something that can't really be ignored when you've got the deputy leader of the Labour Party saying she will personally expel or she will, if needs be, expel thousands of thousands of members whilst basically misrepresenting what they are in fact saying and debating. I think that's a serious problem that does need to be resisted. I mean, Michael, I don't want this to turn into like mutual appreciation society, but I do think that you've consistently been one of the strongest voices on this issue. And I think that one of the things that you said a couple of days ago, and I stalk you on social media, just keep an eye on what you're doing, is that you said that Keir Starmer could navigate the situation through honesty. And sometimes that means also telling hard truths. And that is not the strategy that he has taken as a leader. He's looked at what the anti-Semitism issue did to Corbyn's leadership. And I think wherever you are on it, whether you think that there was an endemic problem of anti-Semitism in the party or whether you think that it was isolated to a few individuals, whether you think of problems with the processes or not, I think everyone can agree that when those attacks ratcheted up and you listen to the today program and it's like one, two, three items on labor and semitism, Jeremy Corbyn hemorrhaged moral credibility in the eyes of the public and it ended up being very little that he could say or do in terms of reforming the procedures. His office intervened to speed things up. You know, there aren't thou satisfied. You know, it reformed the way in which the disciplinary procedures operated while there aren't thou satisfied. And he became the symbol, the totem, the kind of embodiment of what the problem was seen to be. And it meant that when Keir Starmer entered office, he, I think, of spending all that time in the Shadow Cabinet was like, well, hang on, there's only one real way to be seen to be strong on this issue. And that means zero tolerance on those who are deemed to be anti-Semitic on the left. And that's not the same as dealing with the problem of anti-Semitism as it exists in society and as it exists within the Labour Party. There's obviously been hugely different ways in which, you know, Labour and peace have been dealt with, you know, from one person using an anti-Semitic trope. I think it was in terms of the pieces of silver or shekels or something like that. It was an anti-Semitic trope to do with, you know, selling out and money in ways which would, you know, the imagery was very much there. You know, got away with a retraction and an apology whereas, you know, Rebecca Long Bailey was summarily dismissed from the Labour Front bench. That's about being reactive and being seen to be harsh on those who are deemed to be the problem. And what that means is that you've closed off all the space to be honest. You've completely boxed yourself in. And what you've said is, for as long as, you know, there are certain newspapers, there are certain individuals who write for those newspapers, there are certain aspects of the community leadership say there's a problem with left anti-Semitism, I will show no mercy, give no quarter. There will be no due process for these individuals. The problem for Keir Starmer came when the EHRC report didn't say that. It didn't agree with it. You know, while there was found to be indirect discrimination, that means, yes, there is an institutional problem within Labour. It didn't lay the sole responsibility at the feet of Jeremy Corbyn. It didn't label him as an anti-Semite and said this man has to be kicked out of the party. And so you're back into trying to utilise political means to achieve what is essentially a political goal. You don't have the bureaucracy to hide behind of what I'm just implementing the findings of the report. And that's what the situation that Starmer and Rayner have created for themselves. It's a really difficult one. Because now they're trying to say, well, in the spirit of the EHRC report, we can't have these kinds of discussions about, you know, whether or not it was right to remove the whip from Jeremy Corbyn. The report says nothing like that. The report actually takes quite, you know, pains to say that there are, you know, Article 10 rights to freedom of expression, which includes deviating in opinion on the scale of anti-Semitism even. And those are things which Starmer and Rayner are completely unable to admit or engage with because their entire strategy has been, here's the stick, beat us with it until you've had enough of it. And that's not a way to deal with anti-Semitism within the party. That's not a way to deal with views which may be amongst the membership. It's not a way to deal with, you know, and this is a real thing. And I know it because I felt it at times, a sort of knee-jerk defensive position amongst the left. So I think it's one of those things where everybody loses effectively apart from the Labour right. Because for as long as Keir Starmer is seen to be at the helm of a party which can't keep Jeremy Corbyn out effectively, he too will become subject to some of those attacks. He too will start to lose some of that moral authority. This is a crisis of his making. We're going to go on to another statement from that conference, probably the most memorable one. Before we do that, if you are new to the show, to this channel, do please hit the subscribe button. We want to get up to the next, we want the next 100,000 subscribers now. So hit that subscribe button. We put out content so regularly now. This show goes live Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7pm. Let's take a look at another tweet. This again is from Sienna Rogers who was reporting, Peter Mandelson says, I'm worried about one thing. That is this recommended approach by the EHRC of an independent process. He says the NEC should take ownership of process and an independent process can't do that. Hashtag JLM2020. Now Gabriel Poggrant who's a Times journalist who's been on Aaron's show. He was in conversation with Mandelson when that was said, so he tweets to back up Sienna Rogers. And he says, Peter Mandelson just told me this at Jewish Labour Conference. In short he said, Labour can't allow the left to legalise party management as it did in the 1980s. So EHRC recommendation of an independent disciplinary process cannot stand. So this is amazing. One, I mean what lots of people are pointing out is that he seems to be disagreeing with the EHRC recommendations. Some people are saying that means he should have to apologise and be suspended. I personally think people need to... People are telling everyone to apologise way too much. You're allowed to disagree with what is in a report. But what is clear here, what it looks like to me, and especially with that reference to the 1980s, is that Peter Mandelson wants there to be a disciplinary process that can be utilised by the leadership to get rid of people from the party and an independent process obviously means that you can't be partial in that way. You can't use a disciplinary process. You might be able to, depending on how they draw up the rules, this will be something to look into in the future. But even if you didn't have a totally fair independent disciplinary process, Peter Mandelson wants even more control for the political leadership of the party to determine who can be inside and outside of it. Now that would be worrying enough if it wasn't clear that he is willing to utilise the issue of anti-Semitism to get his way in terms of determining who should be in and who should be outside of the party. And his reference to the 80s is important because he's saying that there, we had all these lefties who, to make Labour electable, we had to purge from the party, but they were using the legalistic structures of the Labour Party, the rules-based structures of the Labour Party to not let us have our way. And what our new Labour project was all about was making sure that the leadership had absolute leeway to determine that the organisation of the party, the direction of the party as they pleased in part according to focus groups to try and make it as electable as possible. Obviously this ended up with a party leadership that was so detached from the membership, so detached from the population at large that they ended up with catastrophic decisions such as the Iraq war, not something we necessarily want to return to. But you can see what's motivating him there. He's saying, I don't want a rules-based system actually. I'm not interested in due process. What I'm interested in is having a leadership who can get their way. And if that means using anti-Semitism to get their way, so be it.