Detoxifying Labour 

A former head of the Crown Prosecution Service and a member of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, Starmer has moved quickly to undo the Corbynite legacy. In his acceptance speech after winning the leadership last month, Starmer offered a full-throated apology for “anti-Semitism’s stain on our party,” pledging to “tear out this poison by its roots.” He’s since given that teeth by culling Corbyn allies like Richard Burgon, a former Shadow Justice Minister who said that “Zionism is the enemy of peace,” and members from Labour’s governing body, the National Executive Committee. That in turn has given him the power to act against some local party branches where anti-Semitism has become endemic.

But the explosive leak of a late Corbyn-era internal report on anti-Semitism has put Starmer under pressure, with Corbynites claiming that it shows how Labour officials sabotaged Corbyn’s electoral chances, and exposing how deeply the far left is in denial over anti-Semitism.

The more than 800-page report contains a mass of unredacted emails and texts between supposedly neutral party officials, in some of which Corbyn lieutenants are disparaged as “Trots” (Trotskyites) and other choice epithets. Originally compiled as an annex to the party’s response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission that is investigating Labour anti-Semitism, the party’s own lawyers banned its publication, because it contains leaked personal correspondence.

But the report has fed a growing “stab in the back” narrative across the party’s ousted far left. Writing in the Guardian, former Corbyn deputy John McDonnell seized on the report to claim that “Labour came within 2,500 votes of forming a government in 2017,” and that in a “shocking act of treachery,” a “group of senior staff undermined the chances of Labour.”