Why the Chakrabarti report is being attacked

In early August, Shami Chakrabarti and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn were accused by anti-Palestinian campaigners of causing a “whitewash for peerages” scandal. The charge came from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which is an organisation which campaigns along reactionary “Israel, right or wrong” lines.

Corbyn had at the end of April tasked Chakrabarti, a well-respected civil liberties campaigner and lawyer, with leading an inquiry into allegations of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party. She delivered her report at the end of June, and it was initially well received, despite some ridiculous nonsense at the launch event cooked up by a hostile media.

At the end of July, Chakrabarti was nominated by Corbyn for a peerage so that she could enter the House of Lords. The Labour leader, who says that he would replace the Lords with an elected chamber if he becomes prime minister, nominated nobody else.

The allegations of anti-Semitism that have dogged Labour since February were, in fact, almost entirely fabricated or exaggerated. The campaign was started, led and encouraged by the right-wing of the Labour Party working in concert with pro-Israel propaganda groups within the party. The campaign was concocted cynically as a way of attacking and smearing Corbyn and other Palestine solidarity activists within Labour, and of pushing back against the left-wing upsurge that brought Corbyn to power.

The Chakrabarti Inquiry was an attempt to defuse the entirely manufactured “crisis” within the party over “anti-Semitism”. By and large, it worked. The reason it worked is that the Chakrabarti report is a serious and sober investigation which had one overriding principle: dealing with the facts and addressing the evidence, as you would expect from a lawyer of good repute.

Even some of the mostly strongly anti-Palestinian groups, such as the Jewish Labour Movement and the Board of Deputies, at first grudgingly welcomed the report and its recommendations. They knew that it was bullet-proof in terms of facts, so they would look ridiculous calling it a “whitewash” (although that didn’t stop some of the more extreme Zionist fanatics predicting as much even before publication).

Now, however, the Board has changed its tune, accusing Chakrabarti of producing a “whitewash” – despite the fact that it had earlier welcomed “aspects” of it – in exchange for being elevated to the House of Lords. There is no evidence to support such claims.

There are, though, some pretty obvious reasons why the Labour right and the anti-Palestinian propaganda organisations want to make sure that the Chakrabarti report’s recommendations are never implemented.

While there may be some valid debate to be had about the wisdom of nominating Chakrabarti for a peerage, it’s clear that most of the accusations against her in this regard are simply an attempt to abort the significant changes that the report will bring to the way that the Labour Party deals with allegations of anti-Semitism; indeed, allegations of wrongdoing of any sort.

The current party rules mean that should anyone make a serious allegation against a member, such as anti-Semitism, party staff acting under the direction of the general secretary (currently Iain McNicol, who seems to be vehemently anti-Corbyn) can essentially take unilateral action to suspend such members temporarily while the allegations are looked into as part of a proper investigation by the party’s disciplinary body.

The fact that the vast majority of these investigations will find that there is no case to answer, and will ultimately quietly drop the allegations, is cold comfort to Labour Party members who have had the right to vote in the leadership election taken away, or had their names smeared all over the right-wing press as “anti-Semites” in hostile leaks that can far too often only have come from party HQ itself. This poisonous process is how much of the “anti-Semitism crisis” was fuelled.

When the Chakrabarti report’s recommendations are implemented, there should be an end to all of this. The report castigated the leakers (without mentioning party HQ or its main inquisitor, the Compliance Unit, by name) and put in place strong procedural changes which means that party staff will no longer be able to act unilaterally, and will have the power of interim suspension taken away. A properly-qualified legal panel will have to be established which will decide on cases where temporary suspension has to be used.

Furthermore, the party press unit will be required to follow up with a standard “no comment” line to the media (hostile and otherwise); press statements will simply say that all complaints will be properly followed-up, and that officials don’t comment on individual cases.

This is the reason for the politicised attacks on Chakrabarti at this moment in time. The report’s conclusions are so self-evidently just that they cannot be challenged on factual terms, but if implemented they would throw a massive spanner in the works for any prospects of resurrecting the anti-Semitism witch hunt. For that reason alone, they are to be welcomed.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.