Keir Starmer has faced criticism for vowing to adopt a “zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism and racism” without having the transparent systems in place to tackle such issues.
Martin Forde KC, the senior lawyer who carried out an inquiry into the party’s culture, said he has become “irritated” by the phrase, which the Labour leader used last month after the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) lifted the party out of two years of special measures over its past failings on antisemitism.
Starmer said at the time: “Today, I make you a number of further promises: Firstly, that under my leadership there will zero tolerance of antisemitism, of racism, of discrimination of any kind.”
But Forde told a virtual event organised by Compass on Monday: “We’ve heard it from various politicians, but you can’t implement zero tolerance unless you’re policing things fairly rigorously and you’ve got transparent systems in place.”
The top lawyer echoed his previous comments that the Labour party must take seriously concerns of black and asian members that their complaints are not being treated as seriously as those related to antisemitism. “It’s not enough to say, ‘I’ve been on a course’, and that means I’m untouchable.”
He also criticised Labour’s decision to not introduce an independent directorate that would oversee the party’s disciplinary process.
“It might be quite expensive, but it seems to me that if the membership had confidence in the transparency and independence of (disciplinary) process, there would be less complaints. I think part of the reason that factionalism has arisen around this is because there is a perception that different groups are treated differently,” Forde said.
Referring to submissions he received when collating evidence for his inquiry, Forde told the event that activists and prospective councillors had sent him submissions referring to occasions “where there have been allegations made against them, which had taken so long to resolve that they felt quite strongly that those had been tactical, also exclusions to thwart them from progressing within the political hierarchy”.
The lawyer questioned how members would be able to feel “confident” in the transparency or independence of the process.
A senior left-wing Labour MP said after the event: “If you want to know how your party will treat you in government look at how it treats its members.”
“As soon as I was appointed [to lead the inquiry], I had a lot of worrying emails from CLP members, councillors, professors, prospective councillors and activists, saying they felt that there’d been an emphasis on sexual impropriety, the ‘Me Too’ movement, and on antisemitism, but there’s been a lot of longstanding and lingering complaints around the other protected characteristics,” Forde said.
Labour insists its process treats complaints about protected characteristics equally as they are assessed by an independent review board which has been put into practice since September 2021. The party also indicates that it publishes statistics about its complaints online.
A Labour spokesperson said: “We made a commitment on all protected characteristics to the EHRC and to the public. We’re meeting that commitment.”
Last week Forde expressed concern that the party was enabling a “hierarchy” of racism, and was still not fully engaging with claims that anti-black racism and Islamophobia were not taken as seriously as antisemitism.
He said he does not engage with Twitter so had not seen how his first intervention was taken, but told Compass he was “delighted to have a platform”, after he had no engagement with the party.
Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich West who also spoke at the event, said: “Retrospective bans, a lack of transparency of the process enhances these kind of factional suspicions. The party won’t progress unless the factionalism is dealt with properly.”
Last summer Forde published his 139-page report that accused Labour of “in effect operating a hierarchy of racism or of discrimination”. Responding to the inquiry at the time, a Labour party spokesperson said the report detailed “a party that was out of control”.
Forde had urged the party to implement 165 recommendations, many of which the party says it has put in place. But Forde claims Labour’s lack of debate and engagement over his findings indicates wider issues.
