The Panorama Labour anti-Semitism polemic is a disgrace

The BBC's Panorama report is a sickening hatchet job.

1. The "documentary" states that at the time of Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader complaints about anti-Semitism were almost non-existent, but the obvious reason for this was that until Jeremy Corbyn became leader, anti-Semitism was widely tolerated within the Labour Party and the Labour ranks. Consider the absolute lack of action when Tony Blair's spin doctor Alistair Campbell created anti-Semitic attack posters portraying a Jewish political rival as a pig and a Fagin character.

2. The "documentary" allowed a guy called Mike Creighton to assert that new Labour Party members joining the Labour Party after Corbyn's election as leader brought with them a "worldview" that "allowed anti-Semitism to arise". The reality of course is that after this membership surge occurred the level of anti-Semitic views within the Labour ranks actually fell dramatically.

This is likely due to the fact that Corbyn attracted a lot of socially progressive left-wing anti-imperialist people back to the party, which diluted the bigoted views of the kind of people who approve of the right-wing economic neoliberal orthodoxy and the imperialist war-mongering that caused the humanitarian catastrophes in Iraq and Libya.

 3. The "documentary" makes absolutely no mention of this dramatic fall in anti-Semitic views within the Labour ranks. Neither does it mention that rates of anti-Semitic views are lower within Labour than in other parties like the Tories and Lib-Dems, and lower than the general population too.

This is the kind of context that's absolutely vital in giving a reasonable impression of the true scale of the problem.

4. The "documentary" includes claims from someone called Louise Withers Green that she interviewed Jackie Walker. Walker claims to have never even met this person and that the claims about her are fabricated. 

Walker was provided no right to reply to dispute the claims about her.

5. The "documentary" allowed Labour's former Chief Disputes Officer Kat Buckingham to claim that the right-wing controlled Labour disputes team were bringing "civility back into proceedings" and another former member called Dan Hogan to claim that "we had a really good team". 

What they had actually been up to was the orchestration of a mass purge of thousands of left-leaning Labour members for "crimes" like once retweeting a Green politician, admitting they voted for other parties long before they joined Labour, and liking the Foo Fighters too much! 

This hyper-partisan purge was aimed at reducing the Corbyn vote and throwing the 2016 leadership election in favour of Owen Smith, hardly what anyone would describe as either "civil", or "good".

6. The mass purge failed, and Corbyn was re-elected leader with an even bigger mandate, but the thousands of purged members demanding readmittance created an unmanageably vast backlog of disciplinary cases, meaning that legitimate cases involving anti-Semitism got buried under the pile. 

The documentary made no mention whatever of the extraordinary Anyone But Corbyn purge and the essential role it played in creating the massive backlog of disciplinary cases.

7. When the right-wing head of the NEC Ian McNicol was finally replaced by Jennie Formby, she insisted that serious cases like anti-Semitism accusations be sped up. The "documentary" sought to portray her as a terrible sinister figure for wanting to change the disciplinary team responsible for orchestrating the purge, creating such a massive backlog of cases, and sitting on extremely serious cases - including anti-Semitism accusations - for years!

8. Formby, who is currently undergoing treatment for cancer, was afforded no right of reply.

9. Unike Formby the former right-wing General Secretary of the NEC Ian McNicol (the guy who oversaw all of this rank incompetence) was allowed a say, in which he claimed that "to try to interfere politically within the [disciplinary team] is just wrong", which would be an entirely fair point had the  right-wing faction of the party he represents not recently made very public appeals to Jeremy Corbyn to interfere politically by reversing the reinstatement of Chris Williamson. Apparently it's wrong for the General Secretary to interfere by making sure the party can't be sued for discrimination over its disciplinary decisions, but somehow right and entirely justifiable to demand that Corbyn personally interferes to expel someone they don't like! 

10. The documentary claims that "one by one party officials tasked with investigating anti-Semitism left their jobs" as if they simply weren't replaced, when the reality was that they were replaced with a larger and more competent team tasked with dealing with the massive backlog their incompetent predecessors had created.

11. Perhaps the most glaring problem of all was the use of a ridiculously doctored quote from Seumas Milne that was deliberately cut mid sentence to dramatically alter the meaning.

Here's what the documentary quoted: 

"something's going wrong, and we're muddling up political disputes with racism."

and here's the full sentence:

"But if we're more than very occasionally using disciplinary action against Jewish members for antisemitism, something's going wrong, and we're muddling up political disputes with racism"

So what Milne was actually raising concerns about was Labour anti-Semitism procedures being used to hound Jewish people out of the Labour Party, but the documentary makers deliberately cut the sentence in half to shear it of context and radically alter the meaning.

As yet the BBC have made no explanation of why the quote was doctored in this way, let alone an apology.

John Ware laughing and joking about being one of the worst
anti-Muslim bigots in the British mainstream media.

12. The "documentary" maker John Ware is a former S*n journalist, and renowned anti-Muslim bigot who laughs and jokes about being recognised as one of the five worst Islamophobes in the cesspit that is the UK mainstream media. 
It's extraordinary that the BBC decided to commission such a person to produce a show about the subject of bigotry in politics.

13. The general tone of the entire "documentary" was to give an entirely uncritical hearing to numerous disgruntled former staff members as they completely absolved themselves of blame for the appalling mess they made, excused their theft and destruction of confidential documents, smeared the leadership, and disparaged the hundreds of thousands of left-wing socially liberal members who have joined the party since 2015.

Conclusion

I could go on with more criticisms, but I can't be bothered to spend all day critiquing such a venal, politically partisan, one-sided polemic masquerading as a serious BBC documentary.

Anti-Semitism and all forms of racism and bigotry need to be confronted wherever they occur, especially in an anti-racist organisation like the Labour Party, but hyper-partisan hatchet jobs like this are clearly not the answer, because doctoring quotes and giving platforms to staggeringly incompetent people to whitewash their incompetence does not help to fight anti-Semitism at all, it actually diminishes the fight by making the entire scandal look faked for political purposes.

If you wish to complain to the BBC and demand answers, especially over the blatantly doctored quote, the repeated factual inaccuracy, the dreadful lack of context, the entirely uncritical hearing provided to disgruntled ex-staffers to absolve themselves of responsibility for the mess they made, and the despicable unapologetic Islamophobia of the producer, here's the complaints form: BBC complaints.

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