Labour Against Antisemitism, a campaign by activists to force the party to address sickening levels of anti-Jewish hate, has submitted a report containing 15,000 online screenshots showing examples of alleged anti-Semitism in the organization.
The dossier, submitted to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), contains “15,000 screenshots taken from hundreds of Labour members and officials promoting antisemitic views,” the group said in a statement.
The Sunday Times reported last month that the equalities watchdog is set to launch a full investigation into the Labour Party over its failure to root out anti-Semitism. Since its inception 12 years ago, the EHRC has investigated only one political party over unlawful discrimination – the British National Party, or Nazi party.
Euan Philipps, a spokesperson for the campaign group, said in a statement that over the last two years, a team of volunteers “has systematically collected and detailed evidence of Labour Party members promoting antisemitic views and tropes across a range of social media platforms.
“This has all been reported to the party’s compliance team, in a format suggested by them and including a significant level of detail,” he added.
Philipps stressed that the Labour Party had shown little effort to deal with the problem. “Most distressing of all, reports containing the most appalling levels of racism have been given only the lightest reprimand,” he explained. “The message again and again has been the same: we don’t care about this issue.”
The EHRC board is set to meet in May to decide the full scope of the investigation. Labour Against Antisemitism said it seeks a “full-scale antisemitism probe.” The watchdog began pre-enforcement proceedings against Labour last month, after legal complaints were made last year by the Campaign Against Antisemitism and the Jewish Labour Movement.
In a tape leaked to the Sunday Times last month, Labour’s controversial leader Jeremy Corbyn – who has overseen a massive surge in anti-Jewish hate within the party – admitted that evidence of anti-Semitism has been “mislaid or ignored.”
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