By Rachel Lever
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” The Ninth Commandment. The word of God.
In English law, perjury is a crime too. But what happens when the accused neighbour is the Labour Party, now reeling under a barrage of accusations that it is “mired in antisemitism”?
Jan Royall’s report into supposedly “antisemitic” incidents and “a problem with Jews” at Oxford Labour Club famously found that there was nothing to be found. She also famously advertised her frustration and disappointment at finding nothing, maybe indicating that if she had any bias it was to make a tasty meal out of it all.
These supposed incidents were further discredited when it turned out that at least one of the complainants was secretly connected to a rival political party. Yet, for all their implausibility, they were the first shoots that grew into the choking weed of Labour’s alleged “antisemitism crisis.” And despite the myth being totally dispelled, it is still working its merry way through the system.
Copies of Royall’s report were handed out to members of Labour’s Executive Committee at its meeting on 17 May, and then collected back in, apparently after a substantial discussion. They concluded that it was completely unacceptable to use antisemitism/racism as a factional political tool.
Yet no-one seems to have asked the obvious question: why were these complaints made in the first place, who stood to benefit from the factional political tool of smearing the Labour Party with such falsehoods, and how should the bearers of false witness, and all their accomplices and co-complainants, be pilloried and punished?
Far from it: some of those who screamed and shouted may soon be given the franchise to tutor office holders in the party on antisemitism. Might we hope that this includes the Ten Commandments?
