The Corbyn Antisemitism Thing Timeline

I’m drafting a diary about defining antisemitism, on the left and on the right, spurred by David Baddiel’s recent book “Jews Don’t Count”— likely to be the only book in history blurbed by Sarah Silverman, Neil Gaiman, and Sir Keir Starmer. But unsurprisingly the draft keeps getting invaded by a specific example, the stand-out example of recent modern left-wing antisemitism in a place that’s old enough to know better. So let’s do that one separately here.

I’ve diaried about the saga of the Labour Party in the UK and its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, but I haven't really told the saga itself: a gang of political incompetents, unshakably certain of their own holiness and virtue and acting in the name of the greater good, foolishly parlayed one man’s moral blind spot into a massive racism scandal that badly tarnished a modern major left-wing party. It's a cracking tale in its own right, one I watched unfold in real time.

There are at least four important threads that weave and intersect, so keep an eye on each of these (you'll need four eyes): the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, the "whistleblowers," the "leaked report," and the IHRA definition/examples of antisemitism.

Note that I refer below to a guy named Seumas Milne; if you don’t know of him, he’s more or less Corbyn’s Bannon, a posh-Maoist-on-daddy’s-money type. His dad ran the BBC. (His grandpa invented Winnie the Pooh, and “Christopher Robin” is IIRC Seumas’s uncle, and unhappy to be immortalized as a little boy, but that’s another story.)

I also refer to Labour’s National Executive Council (NEC), their main policy-making board, loaded for most of the length of this narrative with bloc-voting Corbyn loyalists.

I’ll be writing more about the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Association, not International Hot Rod Association) “working definition” of antisemitism in that promised other diary, but for this one it’s enough to know that it’s probably the most widely accepted definition of antisemitism in the world, having been adopted or endorsed by the State Department, the European Parliament, the OAS, Canada, France, Germany, the UK, the Czechs (děkuji, Czechs!), and lotsa others.

I do not know whether the International Hot Rod Association has an official definition of antisemitism.

Remember, this is a left party. Roll film.

• I first bumped into the name Jeremy Corbyn in 2015. The context of the article I read was that Corbyn was an obscure British MP apologizing about hanging out with a reasonably well-known Holocaust denier, and also, by the way, he might end up leading the Labour Party. Now, I knew this Paul Eisen guy was a Holocaust denier in 2005, and I was six time zones away in the cornfields of central Illinois. Why didn’t Corbyn know that in 2013 when he was just down the street? A pretty big blind spot: he can’t detect antisemitism if that antisemitism is wrapped in the language of the left, and so he gives it a free pass. Trouble is clearly on the way.
• July 2015: Jeremy Corbyn is elected Labour leader, despite noticeable disquiet about him in the Jewish community. He is elected significantly on the basis of a sort of drive-by hard-left entryist vote from disaffected socialists, left without a party after the Socialist Workers Party imploded in a rape scandal, paying three pounds to claim party affiliation and a vote.
• Following year: Corbyn has a series of “bimbo eruptions,” except that instead of being a stream of revelations about fondled body parts, it’s a stream of revelations about wacky antisemites Corbyn has endorsed, contributed to, praised, invited to Parliament because he was very generous with that free pass. At the same time, obvious antisemites in the party are going unpunished until they “bimbo erupt” into the headlines. It becomes clear to anyone who looks that there’s a pattern, but Labour comms does what it can to dissuade people from connecting the dots.
• Also: Corbyn’s newly empowered circle — particularly his strategic/communications director, Seumas Milne — make it their highest priority to solidify the Corbynista grip on every party mechanism possible at every level possible. They’ve spent decades dreaming of the hard left in party power, and they’re going to do their damnedest to keep it.
• June 2016: The Parliamentary Labour Party — that is, all the Labour MPs taken collectively — hold a vote of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn. He wins handily! No, actually, he doesn’t! He loses more than four to one. But he doesn’t care — he doesn’t have to, he’s Jeremy Corbyn! There’s no official rule that says a party leader who has so comprehensively lost support of his MPs has to step down, so he doesn’t. He’d rather lead a mortifyingly split and dysfunctional party than be a mere backbench MP in a unified and productive one. He wouldn’t want to deprive the world of his very very important leadership and big thoughts. Big league big thoughts.
• Then: Another year of “bimbo eruptions.” None of it takes the form of Corbyn found saying “let’s burn a synagogue,” just his willingness to share platforms with those who also say, “have I ever mentioned, by the way, that medieval Jews in Europe murdered gentile boys to bake their blood in matzoh?” Seumas Milne, eruption cleaner, is using all his comms muscle to push the narrative that Corbyn is a saintly saint of a saintly being, attacked by perfidious Je... sorry, Zionists, with feigned concerns about non-existent antisemitism, and that Good Jews really love him and the ones that don’t are Bad Jews. This is the Good Jew/Bad Jew game antisemites love so well — because it works. “Corbyn isn’t an antisemite, it’s all an anti-Jeremy plot” becomes to Corbynistas what “stop the steal” later becomes to the MAGAites: the favored gang sign you throw to establish your righteousness. Seumas say shout it louder!
• June 2017: General election. Labour loses, but — thanks mostly to a borrowed Remainer vote in shock, and a catastrophically bad campaign by Theresa May — not as badly as everyone expected. The Tories lose an absolute majority but come into government in a narrow coalition. This defeat is spun as a grand victory for Labour. This is Corbyn’s golden hour. Corbynistas come to believe they are only “one last heave” from going over the top, that the UK electorate is crying out for hard-left socialism. The Party’s number one priority now becomes forcing an early general election, which Corbyn will inevitably win (as long as, you know, those Bad Jews keep quiet ...)
• March 2018: Jewish community frustration at Corbyn stonewalling finally boils over. The community holds its largest street demonstration in Parliament Square since the 1940s, about two thousand Jews demanding that Corbyn finally wake the fuck up and act. The theme of the rally is "Enough is enough." The rally gets national press. Labour’s motto at the time was “For the many, not the few”; a widely circulated photo of the rally shows someone holding a sign: “For the many, not the Jew.” (The link is to a really good Atlantic article published a few days before Corbyn’s defeat in December 2019.)
• Also March 2018: Corbyn’s biggest political misstep on any topic that isn’t Jewish, his unwillingness to condemn Putin after two Russians are caught poisoning three British citizens with a nerve agent on British soil. Criticism points at “Corbyn’s spokesman”— someone the Guardian story I linked seems oddly unwilling to name, despite the fact that everyone knows it’s Seumas Milne. Corbyn’s approval rating begins to descend and never recovers. Keep that in mind: all the Corbyn stuff from here forward is being done by someone past his peak and falling to earth.
• April 2018: The “Enough is Enough” rally is sufficiently humiliating — and the coverage sufficiently global, and the Jewish case against Labour sufficiently solid — that Corbyn is finally forced into a round-table meeting with the same Jewish organizations he'd been avoiding at all costs since day one. The meeting is a wreck. (Are you surprised?) Corbyn nods and smiles and then imperiously waves away all six of the demands presented to him by the Jewish community, while Seumas Milne lectures the Jewish community about how terrible they’ve been to poor innocent Jeremy. This is Corbyn and Milne walking into the Last Chance Saloon … and burning it down. Result: the fracture with the Jewish community is now irreparable, and Seumas Milne relies increasingly on a faux grassroots group called “Blacks for Trump.” No, sorry, “Token Jewish Voice for Labour.”
• Summer 2018: In an attempt to make it look like they hadn’t completely torpedoed their relations with the Jewish community, Labour tries to organize a second round table. The meeting never comes. Why should it? The Jewish community’s concerns had been completely blown off at the last one. The Jewish organizations now coordinate their positions very effectively, such that Labour can’t peel them off one by one or play them against each other. He [edit: Milne] tried to get his Blacks for Trump group, not yet a year old, onto an optically equal footing with — for example — the Jewish Board of Deputies, founded 1760. That went nowhere. Nobody was interested in having a conversation for the cameras with a ventriloquist dummy. This is a sea change for the previously fractious community. And it works.
• Also Summer 2018: Looking for signs of action on antisemitism, the Jewish community suggests that Labour could show it was serious by adopting the IHRA “working definition” they had only partially adopted so far. (It’s a paragraph definition and then eleven examples. The two together constitute the “working definition” but Labour hadn’t adopted the examples.) Milne, we later learned, was adamant that such a thing could not happen. It was the hill he was willing to die on.
• July 2018: Labour NEC diddles the IHRA definition again, selecting some of the examples and leaving others out. The Corbynista NEC approves a dishonest muddle — trying to look like it’s accepting the IHRA definition and examples without having actually done so. It’s inherently a duplicitous act: here, Jews, we accept bits of it, that should be good enough for you lot, but we want you to give us credit for having adopted the whole thing. This, incidentally, is the point at which I personally found I could no longer defend Corbyn against the charge of antisemitism; diddling in an official capacity with a widely supported definition of antisemitism to exonerate yourself and your friends is a mens rea admission. (It’s also by the way the same NEC meeting where Corbynista Pete Willsman so memorably shat the bed.)
• Also July 2018: The shared editorial. The UK’s three Jewish newspapers, for the first time ever, coordinated their front pages to match. They printed an editorial with a simple message aimed, not at Jews, but non-Jews: Corbyn Labour really is that bad, we really are that worried, and the problem really isn’t just the matter of a few fringe malcontents, if they’re also the ones leading the party.
• Also July 2018: The rabbis’ letter. This is, to me, still the most amazing moment of the whole business. You can’t get five rabbis to agree that the day after Tuesday is Wednesday. This is a thunderclap, an incredible act of Jewish unity.Corbyn and Milne have done more to unify the Jewish community in the UK than anything since WWII. These 68 rabbis don’t even agree that they’re actually 68 rabbis, sectarianism being what it is, but here is the whole spectrum in agreement on one point: Corbyn, stop diddling the IHRA definition.

The Labour party’s leadership has chosen to ignore those who understand antisemitism the best, the Jewish community. By claiming to know what’s good for our community, the Labour party’s leadership have chosen to act in the most insulting and arrogant way.

It is not the Labour party’s place to rewrite a definition of antisemitism accepted by the Crown Prosecution Service, College of Policing, the Scottish parliament, the Welsh assembly, the National Union of Students, and 124 local authorities, including scores of Labour-held councils, including Haringey and Greater Manchester – but above all else, accepted by the vast majority of Jewish people in Britain and globally.

• September 2018: the polling company Survation (generally regarded, if anything, as mildly Labour-friendly) publishes a poll showing that 86% of Jews in the UK consider Corbyn personally antisemitic. The same poll says that 39% of UK Jews would seriously consider leaving the UK if Corbyn won.
• Also September 2018: The Corbynista-held NEC, mortified by month after month of horrendous headlines about how they were mendaciously blocking the antisemitism definition overwhelmingly supported by the Jewish community — and all because it happened to be exactly what they were doing — unanimously threw Milne under the bus and adopted the undiddled, un-Milne-ified IHRA document. Final outcome of the whole IHRA battle: The NEC is badly damaged. Corbyn is badly damaged. Labour is badly damaged. And everyone knows it’s all down to Seumas Milne. Even Corbyn, otherwise incredibly out of his depth on the whole topic, gets that.
• Fall 2018: Seeing no path for action inside Corbyn’s Labour, several Jewish groups — including an affiliate of nearly a century’s standing, the Jewish Labour Movement — make formal submissions to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, a governmental anti-discrimination office something like our EEOC. These are very solid submissions asking them to investigate whether Labour as an organization is breaking anti-discrimination law. The EHRC will have to decide whether the evidence of discrimination is substantial enough to trigger a full statutory inquiry. The EHRC contacts Labour for a reply to the submissions. That reply is coordinated by Seumas Milne. Can you guess how that works out?
• February 2019: My hero, Deborah Lipstadt, famous for defeating the Holocaust denier David Irving and now the State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, publishes a book about contemporary antisemitism, Antisemitism: Here and Now. Corbyn is a recurring character. Lipstadt’s position is diplomatic: whether or not Corbyn is antisemitic personally, his impact has been to promote and fuel antisemitism. (This also came up when I saw her on the book tour, and she gave a similar response.)
• March 2019: Another Survation poll of the Jewish community. 87% this time. Slightly fewer than five percent of Jewish women agree “Jeremy Corbyn is not an antisemite.”
• Also March 2019: the EHRC announces that the submission coordinated by JLM was damning enough to trigger a formal statutory investigation. It's a high threshold but the evidence met it, and the decision is the first solid legal recognition that, no, the Jews aren't making it all up. This investigation becomes a big ugly hammer hovering over Corbyn for the rest of his leadership term (almost over at this point). One of the interesting consequences of this announcement is that, because there was a statutory investigation going on, various non-disclosure agreements signed by Labour staff became unenforceable. It was a mass unchaining. Leading quickly to --
• July 2019: the BBC documentary series Panorama shows an episode called Is Labour anti-semitic? including some truly truly awful revelations from whistleblowers about how antisemitism cases were handled in a partisan manner by Labour. It's blistering (and, later, BAFTA-nominated) journalism that leaves Labour reeling. Corbyn Labour strikes back by viciously libeling the whistleblowers; the whistleblowers then sue the Labour Party for libel.
• Also July 2019: Theresa May out, Boris Johnson in. Boris is, like Trump, a day-to-day improviser utterly without morals, and that turns out to make him surprisingly tenacious. even today.
• Fall 2019: Boris Johnson, out on Brexit maneuvers, makes the very call for a general election that Labour had been praying for. But Corbyn goes into it far past his electoral prime. His campaign, to put it mildly, lacks direction, darting from issue but unable to connect the dots. The antisemitism crisis has also tarnished him. Labour responds, as always, with its usual counter-narrative: it’s all a Zionist plot, Jeremy hasn’t a racist bone in his body, right-wing, Murdoch, Netanyahu, bla bla bla. Pity the UK voter, having to choose between Dumb and Dumber but divided only on which was which.
• Mere seconds later: Internal Labour polling shows Corbyn will lose big.
• September 2019: Polling gives Corbyn a net positivity rating of a brisk and cheery -60%, the lowest of any opposition leader since the survey began forty-some years earlier.
• November 2019: The Jewish Labour Movement, despite being a Labour group, says that “We’re pro-Labour, but we can’t possibly campaign for getting the antisemite Corbyn into government, so don’t ask.” They sit this one out.
• November 2019: Another thunderclap. The Chief Rabbi of the UK — after agonizing about it, given the non-partisan position — issues a statement saying that Corbyn’s threat to the Jewish community is too substantial to ignore. His message isn’t that Corbyn is personally antisemitic, but that Corbyn’s blindness to antisemitism would empower antisemites in a Corbyn government, just as it had in Corbyn Labour, and that friends of the Jews should hear the community’s plea and vote accordingly.
• November 2019: a fun article in the Atlantic. Which figure has a better claim on being the UK’s Trump, Johnson or Corbyn?
• December 2019: a fun article in the Washington Post. Just so you know I’m not exaggerating. Cameos from Team Lipstadt: Anthony Julius and Richard Evans.
• Also December 2019: Election day! Time’s up! Labour goes down to its worst Parliamentary defeat since before the ballpoint pen. If you’ve been wondering how Boris Johnson could possibly have sealed an eighty-seat majority in Parliament, there’s your answer. It’s not that Johnson won, it’s that Corbyn lost. The voters decided quite solidly which of the two was Dumb and which was Dumber. Corbyn says he'll resign as party leader ... eventually, some day ... and then holds the reins another five months. His net approval rating grazes -70% IIRC as Labour voters see the smouldering wreckage Corbynism left behind.
• Early 2020: In their last months in power, tick tock tick tock, the doomed Corbyn leadership circle takes one last stab at shaping the antisemitism narrative, in the form of a new submission to the EHRC in which Corbyn walks on water, the slow-walking of antisemitism cases was a tragic problem Corbyn had inherited and was desperate to fix, everything was getting so much better, la la la, and by the way the reason Corbyn lost so badly is that a fifth column of Labour employees had conspired internally to sabotage him. It hits that last message so hard so often that it’s pretty clear that sending this message is the real goal of the document. It's an 860-page compendium so obviously slanted and transparently cherry-picked from leaked internal emails that the head of Labour's legal unit refuses to submit it to the EHRC.
• April 2020: Sir Keir Starmer is elected Labour’s new Leader on the first ballot. I approve. He’s a good guy. Corbyn's hand-picked successor, Rebecca Long Bailey, doesn't even get a quarter of the vote. Corbynism is a spent force in Labour. Within literally five minutes of taking charge, Starmer issues an apology to the Jewish community for the nightmare Corbyn Labour had put them through. The drive-by hard-left entryists, no longer having the Labour Party as their plaything, mostly stomp off in break-things-as-you-leave mode.
• April 2020: Almost the next day, oh, look, imagine that, someone leaks the 860-page document that was too crap to submit to the EHRC. Someone with a capital ‘s’ and that rhymes with ‘s’ and that stands for “Seumas.” This is the Corbynistas having their revenge on Starmer by handing him a huge internal problem right out of the gate. The problem is bigger than the leakers intend, though: because it was leaked and published on the web in unredacted form, with everyone's email addresses still attached, it's a massive violation of privacy laws. Labour's legal bills become prodigious. But the leak has the effect Milne had hoped: feeding a big chunk of raw and rejuvenating red meat to the dispirited Corbynistas, who — and yeah, Trumpian echoes here — now no longer needed to say “our guy lost” instead of “we wuz ROBBED!”
• April 2020: Labour commissions an independent inquiry into the leaked report and the circumstances of its leaking. It's commissioned from Martin Forde QC. Spoiler: that report still hasn’t arrived.
• July 2020: Starmer settles the whistleblowers' cases in one fell swoop with a payout and an apology. This infuriates the Corbynistas, ever more certain the whole antisemitism thing was merely an anti-Corbyn plot and we wuz ROBBED!
• October 2020: The EHRC hammer falls. The EHRC rules — in an inescapable and legally binding way — that Labour, as an organization, discriminated against Jews and must change its internal procedures. It spells out a remediation plan for Labour. Not a soul is surprised by this outcome. Starmer pledges to comply — not that he has a choice.
• Literally the same hour: Jeremy Corbyn immediately plows his I-am-the-true-victim-here truck straight into Labour's plans to make amends. He is temporarily suspended from the party for this act of pure raw assholery, and "loses the whip" -- that is, is removed from the Labour contingent in Parliament. The chief opposition whip sends him a letter describing the three assurances Corbyn must give to get the whip back, one of which is to retract his I-am-the-true-victim-here assholery. Corbyn doesn’t even bother to reply, let alone retract.
• July 2021: The NEC, increasingly free of Corbynista grip, agrees to proscribe some hard-left members and groups for promoting the lie that the whole antisemitism crisis was “confected” by anti-Corbyn forces. Corbynistas do a DARVO, claiming that Starmer is now on a program of banishing Jews and therefore he’s THE REAL ANTISEMITE, not Corbyn. And we wuz ROBBED! I’m trying to find a way to make a comment along the lines of “fuck these lunatics” without saying “fuck these lunatics,” but, you know, fuck these lunatics.
• September 2021: At Labour’s annual general conference, Starmer is easily able to push through the rule changes for the NEC that constitute a central part of Labour’s response to the EHRC findings, but about a quarter of Corbyn-loyal members vote against it, holding to the Corbynista mantra that the whole antisemitism thing is a right-wing fraud anyway, all a Murdoch myth, and we wuz etc., and who you gonna believe, us or the lying Jews? I mean Zionists?
• October 2021: There is a behind-the-scenes legal battle going on about who actually leaked the leaked report. Labour wants to officially name the leakers -- five of them -- and the five are apparently suing not to be named. It’s a big deal, because if they *are* named, then legal liability for the data breach moves *from* Labour to them. Would I weep if a very large legal bill landed at the doorstep of A. A. Milne’s grandson? Reader, I would not. If it’s the right grandson.
• February, 2022: As Russia invades Ukraine, the UK’s tankiest organization — the Stop the War Coalition — issues a statement blaming NATO aggression. Eleven pro-Corbyn Labour MPs sign it, as does the not-a-Labour MP Corbyn. Starmer puts his foot down: Labour is a pro-NATO party with no room for tankies. Within literally one hour, all eleven Labour MPs withdraw their signatures. Corbyn’s signature remains, however, adding to the stack of things he needs to walk back before getting the whip back.

So, here we are.

Corbyn still hasn't apologized, happily playing martyr. He fades into irrelevance. Starmer now quietly acknowledges that nobody really expects Corbyn to walk enough things enough back to regain the whip -- with the consequence that he can't run as a Labour MP again, and must either run as an independent cleaved from all Labour support or retire from Parliament. When push comes to shove, Corbyn will be shoved.

In response, the Corbyn cadre insist that they’re irreplaceable as a Labour bloc, and that without their support Starmer will inevitably fail. And for some of them, it’s probably true — they’d happily give Boris Johnson and the Tories another government as long as they can blame Starmer and the sabotage myth for it. Like the Trumpies they spend their days flashing their “we want revenge” gang signs at each other on Twitter.

We still haven't seen the much-delayed Forde report. Its delay is inexplicable based on public knowledge, and there's almost certainly some gag-ordered behind-the-scenes battle that can't be mentioned. Labour doesn't know what's in it, or (officially) why it's delayed. Corbynistas believe Starmer is blocking it -- although it isn't in Starmer's hands to block. To them, it's the document that will prove for all time what the Corbynistas all believe anyway, the stab-in-the-back we-wuz-ROBBED story, as if evidence matters to them at this point. I think it's more likely to be tacitly held up on the issue of naming the leakers, or some similar issue, and that in turn is a separate legal thread which must be resolved before the report can be released.

To those who know the story better, yes, I’ve left out Ken Livingstone, Christine Shawcroft and Alan Bull, Shami Chakrabarti, Fucking Len Fucking Mc-Fucking-Cluskey, Chris “Voldemort” Williamson, Margaret Hodge, Louise Ellman, [edit: the wonderful and brave Luciana Berger,] Ken Loach, and the former Corbynista NEC Head of Disputes (!) Claudia Webbe (!!).

Here’s a good place to learn more, though not chronologically.

So. When I talk about left-wing antisemitism, this is what I mean.