 Today was the final day. The inquiry set up into the labor leaks was accepting submissions from staff members, politicians and interested parties. So the inquiry led by Martin Ford QC has been tasked of assessing the contents of the report, which was compiled by Labor Party staff members to be submitted to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, but ultimately wasn't because the lawyers objected and then was leaked to the press and the public. And I'm sure all of our viewers know what was in that report. It was about senior staff members in 2017 taking actions which made it seem as if they were working against the leadership. I say seen because everyone's suing everyone at the moment, but you can you can read them yourself. And which the document also alleged showed their mismanagement of anti-Semitism complaints, potentially for factional reasons and racist and sexist language made about senior politicians, including Diana, but there were probably some of the parts of that report which were most shocking to Labor members. So this this commission, this inquiry will look into the contents of that report, how it came to be made and how it came to be leaked. And yeah, as I say, submissions closed today. Most of those submissions will be anonymous and will remain anonymous. But for various reasons, certain people have leaked theirs to the press. So the first group is a group of ex-staff members who the report alleges sabotage the 2017 general election. In a formal submission to the inquiry seen by the Guardian lawyers for the accused officials say the WhatsApp messages were used selectively and edited to give a false impression. They also say the inquiry should be abandoned given the damage already caused by the leaked report. The 11 page submission claims that some WhatsApp messages sent months apart were joined together to create a false narrative and others were removed so that by such editing a deliberately false impression that racist and misogynistic conversations had taken place. It says the unnamed authors of the leaked report should not have had access to the WhatsApp messages. This always makes me laugh, adding that one member of the WhatsApp group accidentally backed them up by their labor email and a data misuse complaint. So the Information Commissioners Office, I love that the origin story of this report is that one of the staff members in these chats where they sort of shit talk various labor politicians and talk about how much they hate left-wing members of the Labor Party, they downloaded or I don't even know who download I've never downloaded a what Aaron, have you ever downloaded a WhatsApp chat? No, that's not because I'm trying to get compromising material on my dearest friends, which is what this person was probably trying to do. Yeah, so they were probably going to try and get compromising material on someone else who was right-wing, but it ended up fucking them all over. But they're saying the acquirerate should be abandoned, given the damage already caused by the leaked report. Now, if your submission to a report, which is in part about your behavior, says it doesn't seem like there's that much evidence as to what was in the report wasn't what it meant to be. I don't know, maybe they're going to come up with some WhatsApp messages which show that when they told a Channel 4 journalist that Diane Abbott was crying in the toilet that actually within context, that was not an incredibly abusive thing to do to a senior member of your party when you're a senior member of staff. I can't really imagine what that context would be, but theoretically I suppose it could exist. But it doesn't seem like they're relying on this kind of evidence. They're just trying to say this report shouldn't go ahead at all. And when people don't want to be investigated, it's normally because they know they've done something wrong. It's also worth recognizing these people who say they don't want the report to go ahead. The people in charge of this report are not their fractional enemies. I mean, many on the left are disappointed because they think that this report is very much in Keir Starmer's image. And to be honest, I think actually is largely, well, almost pre-judged now that the Labour Party seems about half a million pounds in damages to staff members who the Labour Party had said had acted in ways which were similar to what the report claims. Basically, these were politically motivated people who were acting in a politically motivated way, not in the best interests of the party and potentially not being particularly honest about their role in the party. So the fact that Labour have paid that out means that I don't have that much faith in this report. But even though it seems to be pre-judged in the favour of the people who appear in it, they still want it to be abandoned because they don't want any of this to be touched whatsoever. Corbyn's submission was made jointly with Labour's 2017 election committee. So that includes John McDonnell, John Trickett and Ian Lavery and five senior aides to Corbyn at that time. So in that 2017 election, Carrie Murphy, Seamus Milne, Andrew Fisher, Andrew Murray and Steve Howell. Again, we can go to the Guardian. The former opposition leader and his team said there was overwhelming evidence of sabotage from certain staffers in Labour headquarters. The officials who were not named were uncooperative and refused to allocate resources to winnable target seats, the submission said. Given Labour's narrow loss in 2017, they argued it's not impossible that Jeremy Corbyn might now be in his third year as a Labour Prime Minister, or not for the unauthorised unilateral action taken by a handful of senior party officials. So that's the report from Corbyn and team. I think it seems sensible that they've sort of submitted that as a group so they can't be picked off one by one. We know that that is what Corbyn's opponents prefer to do. And obviously Corbyn's submission was also backed up by an article in Open Democracy by Joe Ryle, who used to work for John McDonnell with some interesting revelations about how committed right-wing staff members were to undermine Corbyn's leadership at the start. Emptying offices, not giving anyone any equipment or computers, even though it was the responsibility of HQ dragging their feet any time an event was supposed to be organised, so basically not doing their job for political reasons, it seems. That's the allegations. I remember going to see Joe Ryle a few weeks into the Corbyn leadership. I remember going to see him in Port Cullis House, where obviously all the new teams were becoming embedded. And I remember him making a video for John McDonnell and he was using a trial version of Premiere Pro, video editing software. And I said, why don't you buy Premiere Pro? You're now working for the Shadow Chancellor. And he said, we can't get signed off for anything. And so he was having to use a new trial version of some software every month rather than just get signed off for a package, Adobe package, which would cost like even a really extensive one for the whole Shadow Cabinet. It's not going to cost huge amounts of money. People really have to understand how bad this was. This was a complete kamikaze effort from day one by people at the very top of the Labour Party to ensure that Corbyn ultimately didn't get very far. And I want to just pick up on what you were saying about the inquiry itself. I suspect it will be a whitewash. We did a great piece on this. It was written by a lawyer very familiar with these kinds of inquiries. That's his job. And he thinks that the way in which the ambit and the focus of the inquiry is so limited, he thinks the motivation here is to really damp things down and constrain its findings rather than scope out and try to discern broader historic systemic problems. We'll see. It doesn't bode particularly well. But what I find interesting is you have the submission by these people saying, oh, we were taken out of context. It's reminiscent of Milo. When people were saying to Milo, you said this outrageous thing. You were an apologist for some terrible kinds of behavior. And he said, you have to see these things in their context. It's the sort of thing like an alt-right troll says. Oh, you said this racist to the sexist thing. That has to be seen in its context. Well, excuse me, if you call somebody puped or a fucking cow, I don't see what context that is going to help you there. Or if you're going to be instructing journalists, hostile journalists as the whereabouts of a black politician who is traumatized by racist abuse on social media, I would love to know the context which would explain that sequence of behavior. And in fact, I mean, that should be more reason for the inquiry. Let's have all of these WhatsApp messages, all of these emails assessed by the inquiry. And hey, why don't we just have it all open to the public? If this is about clearing these people's name and contextualizing what they've said, which have been so dramatically and criminally misrepresented by whoever compiled this report, let's have it all out in the open.