Among the daily repetition of many charges of ugly and systemic antisemitism in the Labour Party, the claim that the organization is ‘institutionally antisemitic’ is surely the most serious and wounding indictment. The accusation has been current since 2016, but it was given unprecedented publicity during and after the 18 February press conference at which seven Labour MPs resigned from the Party to form the Independent Group (TIG), citing institutional antisemitism as one of the main reasons for their departure.
On 7 March the charge dramatically ceased to be a mere allegation. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) announced that: ‘Having received a number of complaints regarding antisemitism in the Labour Party, we believe the Labour Party may have unlawfully discriminated against people because of their ethnicity and religious beliefs’ and will now be ‘engaging with the Labour Party to give them an opportunity to respond’, with the likelihood that it will begin a statutory investigation. Such an inquiry will, in other words, lead to the determination of whether the Party is institutionally antisemitic. Adam Wagner, a barrister at Doughty Street chambers, who acted for one of the two complainants, the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), is in no doubt about this. The other complainant is the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), the official Jewish Labour Party-affiliated socialist society.
The charge is particularly damaging – not principally because it has been made repeatedly by commentators and politicians as if it were indisputable holy writ. But rather because of the huge symbolic significance of the term ‘institutional racism’, of which institutional antisemitism is understood to be a component, in the dominant discourse around reasons for the persistence of racial discrimination and hatred in the UK.
