Some final thoughts on this coming up... https://twitter.com/andrewbartletta/status/1246503225488035842

I’ve never been shy to admit there *was* an antisemitism issue within the Labour Party. There was patently a crank problem which *did* rise in Corbyn’s time, in part because labour had done such an effective job of closing the ranks to any left wing politics that ppl had...

ventured out to less matured enclaves of the left. These enclaves had their own history of antisemitism because Antisemitism, like most racisms, is an exercise in bipartisanship. It is a byproduct, a tool, of white supremacy.

The problem for me was threefold:

1) tackling individual cases - the party failed, repeatedly, on this by being reactive rather than pro-active. It might have felt logical to say “this only makes up 1% of the membership” but that’s still 1% too many.

2) how to hold the party to account - a multi-faith party with a majority membership, staff & mps not belonging to the minority group in question cannot define or dictate said groups oppression. It can’t do nothing & it can’t be seen to be allocating Acceptable & Non-Acceptable..

as an arbiter for legitimacy in a minority group which it does not represent exclusively. Especially when that debate hasn’t been settled *within* the minority group itself. If you pretend there’s no debate around Zionism within the Jewish community then yes, you could conclude..

that labour’s failure to deal with JVL, for example, is an example of its failure towards the Jewish community. You can even level that at Corbyn personally if you wish. The problem is if you’re simultaneously saying (not incorrectly I might add) that minority groups should be...

the decision maker, then you’re asking the majority of the membership to disregard the Jewishness of JVL - which *isnt* our place no matter how much you want it to be. This, imo, played as big a part in the failure to tackle the issue as any suspected malice or intent.

Which leads to the institutional racism charge.

When Carmichael & Hamilton wrote about institutional racism they gave this example:
“When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments...

... of the society. But when in that same city – Birmingham, Alabama – five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of power, food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of...

conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism.”

That is to say, you can have multiple instances of the same racism happening and it still be *individual* acts, whereas for it to be *institutional* it has to arise...

from a root to branch effort of oppression towards a minority group, which achieves the same harm with zero outcry from society.

It’s about barriers. I’m not surprised the same people misunderstanding or misapplying this are the same people who misunderstand or...

misapply intersectionality. Black activists coin terms to describe *our* lived experience and along the way these terms are repurposed in a broadening that distorts what it set out to describe.

I don’t think you can look at the Labour Party and conclude there are barriers to Jewish ppl - there is jewish representation across the board. There are no policies or procedures that explicitly descriminate against jewish ppl. HOWEVER. If you expand it outside the Labour Party

specifically to politics in general, I would argue the opposite to be true. Which is why I was frustrated by the bizarre reasoning that the party could be institutionally racist...but only to *one* specific minority group.

As I said, when the Met Police were found to be institutionally racist, it wasn’t the *because* of Stephen Lawrence’s Murder but what it exposed. That is, there were many Stephen Lawrence’s before Stephen Lawrence.

The awful bitter irony is that there’s probably some truth...

to the claim, but the absolutely woeful deployment of the charge combined with the infuriatingly offensive hierarchy of racism enacted to further it whilst simultaneously denying this hierarchy exists, means little to no progress will be made.