Although she found “no evidence that the Club is itself institutionally anti-Semitic”, she did find evidence that Jews were being excluded from discussion merely because of the fact of their Jewishness, and that in some cases anti-Zionism was being used as a foil for anti-Semitism.
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Allegations of anti-Semitism at OULC came to the fore in February, when its Co-Chair, Alex Chalmers, resigned, claiming many of its members had “some kind of problem with Jews”.
CST chief executive David Delew said: “This rise in reported anti-Semitism comes at a time when division, intolerance and prejudice appear to be deepening within our society”.
Royall adds that incidents of anti-Semitism were not reported at the time to any authority, including the Labour Party, which makes verifying claims hard.
That may limit the scope of the Club to take action, but as far as our Party is concerned anti-Semitism should not be acceptable behaviour at any time in any circumstance – whether it is related to Labour Club activities or not.
A leaked investigative report on allegations of anti-Semitism at the Oxford University Labour Club confirmed numerous incidents of anti-Jewish hatred, but said the trend did not amount to “institutional anti-Semitism”.
Among the 11 recommendations from Royall at the release of the previous report are providing anti-Semitism training access to materials and guidance in order to help them identify and respond to allegations of anti-Semitism in future.
“I was dismayed and ashamed that the ancient virus of anti-Semitism had infected our party and wanted to do whatever I could to ensure that current problems were properly addressed and preventative action was taken to minimize the risk of recurrence”, Royall said in the introduction to her report.
The report said that April, May and June “did see sustained public debate about anti-Semitism, particularly in relation to the Labour Party, and about racism and extremism more generally”.
According to Baroness Jan Royall’s recently published work on this case and similar occurrences within the rest of the Party, some members had indeed been discriminated against on the base of their Jewish identity.
With no one named in the document, it is unclear why the decision was taken by Labour’s NEC to only part-publish the report.
He said: “More troubling has been the attitude of the party leadership, which has been an obstacle to transparency at seemingly every turn, suppressing the initial Labour Students investigation, blocking the publication of Baroness Royall’s report, and instead going ahead with the Chakrabarti Inquiry, which was characterised by a lack of focus and banal recommendations”.
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The baroness sifted through 300 pages of evidence from more than 40 members of the Oxford club, and interviewed eight of them. “This raises serious doubts regarding Labour’s sincerity in tackling antisemitism within its ranks”. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it. In particular, antisemitic language, epithets or tropes will never be tolerated in our movement.
