Two years and more than a few legal challenges since Keir Starmer first commissioned an inquiry, the Forde report has finally landed. To understand where its publication leaves us, it is useful to first remember what prompted it in the first place.
Martin Forde QC was tasked by the Labour leader with looking into an internal report leaked online and to journalists in April 2020. The leaked report started life as a submission to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) inquiry into antisemitism. It was not sent to the EHRC, on the advice of lawyers, but found its way out anyway. The Forde report analyses the allegations made within.
Chief among them was that a “hyper-factional” environment and hostility towards the then leader Jeremy Corbyn impeded efforts to tackle antisemitism. And, rather explosively, Forde indeed concluded that anti-Corbyn elements “seized on antisemitism as a way to attack Jeremy Corbyn” while supporters of the leadership “saw it simply as an attack on the leader and his faction”, with everyone therefore “weaponising the issue and failing to recognise the seriousness of antisemitism”.
He concurred with the EHRC report finding that there was “undue and improper involvement of LOTO [the leader’s office] in a limited number of high-profile disciplinary cases” but found no “clear and convincing documentary evidence that there was a systematic attempt by the elected leadership or LOTO to interfere unbidden in the disciplinary process in order to undermine the party’s response to allegations of antisemitism”. Instead, “The problem was a lack of clarity (on both sides) about how involved LOTO should be; and this was aggravated by the mutual antagonism between HQ staff and LOTO.”
Another allegation made by the leaked report was that an abnormal level of factionalism undermined the party’s ability to win the 2017 general election. While Forde stopped short of saying that the factional rifts lost Labour the election, the conclusions are a damning reading of anti-Corbyn elements in the party HQ. The 138-page document confirmed that some HQ staff “covertly” set up an operation to provide funds for “sitting largely anti-Corbyn MPs and not on campaigns for pro-Corbyn candidates in potentially Tory winnable seats” in 2017, and stated that it was “unequivocally wrong for HQ staff to pursue an alternative strategy”.
The leaked report also made grave allegations of misogyny and racism exhibited by senior party staff. Forde’s appraisal of those allegations make tough reading. The truly ugly picture painted by the leaked report, of politically motivated abuse towards certain people, is supported; female MPs and MPs of colour were “not always treated during the relevant period in the same way as their white/male counterparts”. He found that the messages in the leaked report were not, as some have claimed, “cherrypicked and selectively edited”, and that they betrayed “overt and underlying racism and sexism” and “deplorably factional, insensitive and at times discriminatory attitudes”.
In one particularly sobering section, he found Labour was “in effect operating a hierarchy of racism” because of the attention given to antisemitism and its relationship to “interfactional conflict”, with other forms of discrimination “ignored”. In reference to Labour staffers’ WhatsApp messages about leftwing MP Diane Abbott, he described them as “expressions of visceral disgust, drawing (consciously or otherwise) on racist tropes, and they bear little resemblance to the criticisms of white male MPs elsewhere in the messages”.
Forde did, then, grapple with the most contentious issues of the leaked report and made substantive findings. Much of the Labour left had been convinced, beforehand, that it would be a “whitewash”, and as the delays mounted – remember, this was supposed to be published on 15 July 2020 – that belief only grew stronger. But this was not the case. Forde managed the impossible in writing a report that is broadly seen as “balanced” by Labour’s competing factions.
Luke Akehurst, secretary of Labour First (a component group of the Starmer-supporting Labour to Win umbrella organisation), for example, described it as “nuanced and balanced”. Momentum described the report as a “damning indictment of the Labour right’s attempts to destroy from within the Corbyn leadership”. Perhaps what is most interesting about a report that includes such explosive findings is that it has been used by so many to show that they were, in fact, right all along.
But there is also lots for everyone to be unhappy with as well – perhaps most obviously a tendency to “both sides” the conclusions. For the Corbyn-supportive elements, the effect of finding both sides equally culpable in factional war is to make an equivalence between an elected leader of the party and the unelected staff trying to undermine him. For the anti-Corbyn wing of the party, the conclusion that “both factions” weaponised antisemitism is equally disagreeable. Akehurst branded it “offensive”, arguing in his opinion that: “There’s no moral equivalence between factionalism fighting antisemitism and factionalism whitewashing it.”
Labour now needs to decide which of the report’s recommendations to adopt and which to reject. A paper will be presented and voted on by the party’s governing body, assessing which should be adopted and identifying which there are issues with, in September.
Keir Starmer pledged during his leadership campaign to introduce an independent complaints process. The EHRC report then legally mandated a set of constitutional changes – and the last Labour party conference was devoted to effecting those rule changes. The inescapable conclusion of this report, however, is “job not done”. Forde identified problems with the complaints process and how the party approaches racism more broadly, and made clear that culture change is fatally undermined by factionalism. In short, it is not something that can be solved quickly. And, given the reaction to the report, that factionalism does not show signs of subsiding any time soon.
Elliot Chappell is editor of LabourList
