 Labour agreed to pay substantial damages to seven former employees who sued the party over its response to their appearance in the panorama documentary portraying Labour as institutionally anti-Semitic. The background here gets complicated, as I've just said, stay with me. So the original programme, which aired almost a year ago today, included interviews with former members of Labour Party staff. It was titled Is Labour Anti-Semitic? And the ex-staff members gave accounts that suggested it most certainly was. We did shows on it. Probably most of you will have watched that episode. Now, in response to that documentary, the Labour Party put out this particular statement, or at least a Labour spokesman said this to the media. It appears these disaffected former officials include those who have always opposed Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, worked to actively undermine it and have both personal and political access to grind. This throws into doubt their credibility as sources. So that was the Labour Party spokesman saying you shouldn't really take these people at their word. They're politically motivated. This statement from the Labour spokesman prompted the ex-staff members who had appeared in the documentary to sue the party for defamation. Now, a long legal case ensued. Party lawyers, according to NEC sources, said that the Labour Party had quite a good chance of winning this, of saying no, it wasn't defamation because ultimately what the Labour Party said was true. But with the party now under new management, so Keir Starmer in charge, obviously we've got a new general secretary or the Labour Party has a new general secretary, David Evans. They today instructed lawyers to settle with the ex-staffers, so to give compensation and to apologize. This is the statement that was given in court by Labour Party lawyers. So before the broadcast of the program, the Labour Party issued a press release that contained defamatory and false allegations about these whistleblowers. We acknowledge the many years of dedicated and committed service that the whistleblowers have given to the Labour Party as members and as staff. We appreciate their valuable contribution at all levels of the party. We unreservedly withdraw all allegations of bad faith, malice and lying. We would like to apologize unreservedly for the distress, embarrassment and hurt caused by their publication. We have agreed to pay them damages. So that's a complete self-flagellation. They're really on the part of the Labour Party. They're saying, we were completely wrong. They were completely right. Not only were they completely right, they're brilliant people. They're always so hardworking. This statement from the Labour Party has angered many people on the left. Why? So on the one hand, the lawyers, according to NEC sources, said that the Labour Party would potentially win this case. And now they've settled a figure which is being reported is up to half a million pounds. That's members money. So that's quite significant there. More than that though, I think it's his apology. It's saying you were right. The Labour Party was wrong. And that's because many Labour members have seen what they think is evidence that actually maybe some of these people were grinding a political axe. I'm not sure if you can mix up the phrase in that way or had an axe to grind. And let's get up some of that evidence. So we have also covered this on this show a lot. It was in the Labour Leaks that many of the people or the so-called whistleblowers were portrayed as being very much politically motivated and as often sitting on anti-Semitism claims as well. So let's go to a section of article by my colleague, Charlotte England, which covered this in detail. And much of this concerns Sam Matthews. We'll talk about him on this show. I'm sure he'll come up. He was head of complaints. He played kind of the starring role in the documentary. So on them being politically motivated, the report says Matthew ran a project to suspend Corbyn supporters during the 2016 leadership election. It also says he ran a project during the 2017 general election to secretly divert funds from key marginal constituencies to instead protect MPs who were his factional allies. He suggested that he should be paid extra for his work on this, mentioning that he left £100,000 in the project although it is not clear what this means. Now, that's a quote from Charlotte's article in on Navarra from the Labour Leaks. But if you've read the Labour Leaks as we've discussed on this show, this isn't just speculation. This isn't one person's word against another. There are receipts for all of this, right? So you can see the WhatsApp threads where all of these things are being discussed. So it's being discussed, the idea of suspending Corbyn supporters, etc., etc. So this is someone who it appears was politically motivated. There are also suggestions that Sam Matthews, who in the documentary argued that people in the party had pressured him to let off members accused of antisemitism. Apparently, as head of complaints, he, well, it's alleged that as head of complaints, he sat on antisemitism complaints. So in one case, Matthews handled, this is again from the article, a Labour member repeated, in one case, Matthews handled, a Labour member repeated a conspiracy theory about the Rothschild and said, Jewish people are prone to cry antisemitism and heart back to the Holocaust to curry sympathy. If you challenge their views on Israel, Matthews did not think the statement warranted a suspension. He wrote to a colleague, I don't think there is enough to suspend, although we should send a stern warning about his use of language. Now, you could say in his defence, maybe just that the Labour Party, the staff hadn't been trained properly and what constitutes antisemitism, maybe there he was sort of reacting because he'd been pressured above to be lenient towards people who had expressed antisemitic sentiment online. If those are the questions you're asking, I think this tweet thread from James Schneider, so he's a former senior aide to Corbyn, is incredibly powerful testimony when it comes to, I suppose, the political wranglings that were going on within the Labour Party at this point in time and why we shouldn't necessarily take everyone at their word. So in this tweet, Fred James Schneider, who was obviously one of the senior aides to Jeremy Corbyn, he's talking about a text, an interaction by text that he had with Sam Matthews, which also means obviously there are going to be receipts for this. So when it was published that there was this Facebook Live group or Palestine Live on Facebook, there were some people sharing antisemitic material on there, including someone who was sharing awful Holocaust denial, really gross stuff, really outrageous, explicit antisemitism. Now, there's a media storm about this. James Schneider says this person should surely be under investigation or they should surely be suspended, in fact. And he says that Sam Matthews in response says, oh, yeah, we're working through this. We're working through this in an organized way. But James is like, how come you had time to suspend a Jewish activist who has said hardly anything in this group and nothing which is obviously antisemitic in this group and you haven't suspended this guy who is promoting fundamentally Holocaust denial. He says, Sam Matthews says, oh, I'll deal with it in time. Then James is saying he has to tell the media, yeah, we're dealing with this, we are suspending people. And Sam Matthews doesn't deal with this guy who has shared explicit antisemitic material for months. So I think it comes up months later. It wasn't until the following year that it comes up again. And James Schneider has to intervene again. And so you've got here someone who is saying the reason he wasn't dealing with antisemitism claims when he was, you know, the head of complaints at the Labour Party was because people above him were pressuring him not to. And here you've got an explicit example, which James says he has shown to journalists, an explicit example of Sam Matthews head of complaints being told by someone in Jeremy Corbyn's office to expel someone for explicit antisemitism and then him sitting on his hands. So to me, this is such an important bit of evidence in this case. And it doesn't seem like any senior journalists are reporting on this. You can see why a Labour Party spokesperson last year would have said, you know, these are people with a political gripe. They weren't particularly, you know, they don't really have the moral authority to talk about this right now, because they sat on complaints, etc, etc. Now, the party has basically said these people were incredibly hardworking. They've been treated appallably by the party. We're going to get them hundreds of thousands of pounds, you know, across the group. And we're going to apologise unreservedly. Now, me looking at all the evidence in front of me, that doesn't seem like a fair result. That also doesn't seem like the result, you know, that you would take if what you seriously care about is antisemitism. It looks like the result you would put out there or that you would bring about if what you wanted to do was protect your fractional allies, and make sure that this case would never get to a judgement. Because now, obviously, because it's been settled, a judge will never rule on this case. We'll never know whether or not this was liable. I'm going to bring in now a guest we're incredibly lucky to have on to discuss this, and who I apologise for having kept you waiting a while. Justin Schlossberg, senior lecturer in journalism and media. How are you doing? Good, thank you. Thanks for having me. You're also the author of Bad News for Labour, Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief. So someone who has spent a lot of time investigating this particular topic. So this development today, so in court, the Labour Party saying we're going to settle, we're going to apologise to you, even though the lawyers have sort of suggested, according to the NEC source, that they had a good case. And if you're looking at the evidence that we've just put out there now, it seems like the Labour Party statement or the statement from the spokesperson was not, you know, wildly inaccurate. Are you surprised at this particular outcome? Am I surprised? I mean, I'm never shocked, but I'm always surprised at just how deeply corrupt the Labour Party seems to be becoming, and also how this eye-watering scandal, as you've very clearly and methodically laid out, is just receiving, once again, barely no attention from the so-called Liberal, Fourth Estate media. You know, the fact that what you just read out is not a lead headline in the Guardian and the BBC, and to be frank, every mainstream platform that has spent the best part of the last four years doing nothing but reporting on factional stories about the Labour Party that turned out to be the inverse of what was really going on is astonishing. And it's a reflection of just how deeply malaised our media system and our democracy has become. The way this has been reported, I think that's a really important point. I want to get up a tweet today from Laura Coonsburg, who is probably the most senior political journalist in the country. So in response to Labour apologising, she says, quite something for Corbyn to accuse Stammer, former boss of the CPS, after all, of making a political, not illegal decision. Now we'll get onto the details of what Corbyn said precisely in a little bit. But the idea that she's saying, well, how could this possibly be political? He used to be a lawyer. Now, James Schneider there is saying, journalists were aware that he has these tweets where he is saying to some Matthews, can you please investigate this Holocaust denier? And he's sort of sitting on his hands basically waiting months to do it. Now, you might think it's worthwhile for BBC's political editor to ask James what's going on, sort of a mental report in an investigative fashion, what the truth of the matter is, instead of just saying completely banal things about Keir Starmer's previous job. But again, we've seen this before, right? Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, the BBC is deeply implicated in this story. They ran a program a year ago called Is Labor Antisemitic, which is as you described, at the heart of this scandal. It was clear almost immediately to many people, not just Labour members, not just Jewish Labour members on the left, like myself, hundreds of Jewish Labour members who were on record at the time defending Corbyn's efforts to tackle antisemitism in the party. But as I've later discovered, it really did cross, the outrage really did cross partisan lines. And when I launched a campaign to just to review Ofcom's decision simply not to investigate the program after 1500 complaints, more than 1500 complaints and more than two dozen of those that were escalated to Ofcom. I was very surprised to see that a number of big people who supported that campaign were, for instance, active members of the Lib Dems. This is really an outrage of epic proportions. And the BBC produced an air-to-documentary that should never have got past its editorial compliance regime. It has one of the strictest, most wide-ranging editorial compliance regimes of any news broadcaster in the world. And it's quite astonishing the lapses of basic journalistic standards that took place. For instance, the fact that the program makers had access to hard evidence, leaked email evidence, that didn't just cast doubt on the testimony provided by whistleblowers like so-called whistleblowers like Sam Matthews, but they directly contradicted that testimony in the way that you just described. They showed that in fact members of the leader's office were repeatedly appealing to the very people who appeared on that program to take more action, to take swifter action, to take more robust action in dealing with anti-Semitism complaints and were met with not much more than a brush off. And this evidence was ignored. And that's astonishing for a BBC documentary to just not even mention evidence that directly contradicts the accounts of its main contributors. And furthermore, and perhaps even more egregiously, the BBC has claimed throughout the process of the complaints, winding their way through its own framework and then to off-common and eventually in a submission to the High Court that it offered the Labour Party a full quote, a full right of reply. Now, if you look at, as I've seen a copy of Labour's pre-borecast reply, and there are examples of this included in the article that I published today on Navarra, it's very clear that not only were key sections of that reply omitted, but it even included, for example, a statement on the record that was presented in emboldened text and even followed by the caveat that if you don't include this in your program, we will consider it a deliberate attempt to mislead viewers. And the program didn't include it. So that fatally undermines the BBC's defence in one blow to many of the complaints that were laid before it and raises very serious questions about what off-com we're doing when they took something like three months simply to decide not to investigate the program. This is Aisha Hazareka, who is a columnist at the Evening Standard and now has a show on Times Radio. So she tweeted today, not only does today's ruling show Corbin and his team for who they really are, it also exposes beyond doubt his outriders who screamed smears and abused anyone who dared criticise the dear leader. They all did such damage to Labour, a reminder that cults are a really bad thing. Now, apart from being a bit rude, let's get that up, see if you can spot what is just inaccurate here. It's that first, the first five words, not only does today's ruling, there was no ruling today. The judge has not ruled on this case. No judge has said this was defamation or it wasn't defamation. What has happened is that the Labour Party has a new leader and a new general secretary and they have conceded the case. They said, we don't want this to go any further because we think that actually the Labour Party was entirely in the wrong. One might think the reason they're saying the Labour Party was entirely in the wrong is because the people who were in charge of the Labour Party last year were their factional enemies and the people who were taking the Labour Party to court were their factional friends. I mean, obviously, you can make your own mind up about that one, but the idea that you can say this is a ruling, if you're a professional journalist, a professional Labour commentator, this ruling, there was no ruling. It's just wrong. Let's get up Corbyn's response as well, obviously. This is going to be significant. This was his Facebook post in response to it. The key bits really, the party's decision to apologise today and make substantial payments to former staff who sued the party in relation to last year's panorama programme is a political decision, not a legal one. Our legal advice was that the party had a strong defence and the evidence in the leaked Labour report that is now the subject of an NEC inquiry led by Martin Ford QC strengthened concerns about the role played by some of those who took part in the programme. The decision to settle these claims in this way is disappointing and risk giving credibility to misleading and inaccurate allegations about action taken to tackle antisemitism in the Labour Party in recent years. You can see from that he is basically saying that the original statement was correct. There were misleading and inaccurate allegations made. The Labour leaks I think he's referring to there suggest that some of these people weren't operating in good faith. This claim now has led the lawyer of the director of the show and the ex-staff members to suggest that they might now sue Jeremy Corbyn for defamation, which would be interesting because then finally we'd get a judgement on it. I kind of hope they do because looking at the evidence in front of me, I don't think what the Labour Party defamatory.