Keir Starmer has acted with precision over the antisemitism report – including the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn

However, it will take some time before the damage that was done to the good name of the Labour Party can ever be restored, writes John Rentoul

Starmer leaves home to respond to the EHRC report (Getty)

I don’t know if it is true that a fish rots from the head, but it is certainly true that the problem of antisemitism in the Labour Party came from the top. 

We can leave aside the debate about whether Jeremy Corbyn is himself antisemitic. He has said he was “always determined to eliminate all forms of racism” and none of us has a window into his heart. The fundamental problem identified by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission investigation lay in the politics of the leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020. 

Corbyn’s paranoid view of the world was, in my view, always likely to encourage antisemitic ideas, especially when reinforced by his “anti-imperialist” reading of the history of the state of Israel. 

The Labour Party had already done the most important thing in dealing with antisemitism, therefore, which was to replace Corbyn as leader with someone who has a different worldview. So today’s standoff that resulted in Corbyn’s suspension from the party was the logical next step in the crisis. 

Keir Starmer seems to have judged his response to the EHRC report with some precision. He had said in advance that he would accept all its recommendations, so that means that the party will now have an independent body to investigate complaints, which it should have had from the start. The report’s most damning procedural finding, of interference by the leader’s office in disciplinary cases, will therefore be put right. 

But Starmer also said something else important in his statement welcoming the report. He said that anyone who thinks the problem of antisemitism has been exaggerated by those seeking to attack Corbyn ought to be expelled. 

“If, after all the pain, all the grief, and all the evidence in this report, there are still those who think there’s no problem with antisemitism in the Labour Party, that it’s all exaggerated, or a factional attack, then, frankly, you are part of the problem too, and you should be nowhere near the Labour Party either.”

This was a direct challenge to Corbyn and his core supporters. When he was leader, Corbyn equivocated on this point, saying sometimes that the problem of antisemitism was real, and not invented to “smear” him, but at other times that it had been exaggerated by his political opponents. 

Today, in a statement issued while Starmer was speaking, Corbyn accepted that antisemitism had been a problem, but added: “The scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party.”

That looked like grounds for Starmer to say that he should be “nowhere near the Labour Party”, but Starmer dodged the question from journalists, saying that the EHRC had made no findings against individuals. When The Independent’s own Andrew Woodcock pointed out that such findings were outside the EHRC’s remit, Starmer merely repeated himself. His was a nervous, lawyerly and only fitfully empathetic performance. 

The real drama was to come. Starmer gave Corbyn the chance to retract, and he refused to do so. Instead he went on TV to repeat that he thought the problem was inflated and to deny that he was “part of the problem”. So he was suspended. 

A Labour spokesperson was keen to stress that decision was taken by the Labour Party, not by the leader’s office, which should not after all interfere in disciplinary matters. However, the decision was hardly the result of an “independent complaints process” – because Starmer said that won’t be set up until “as soon as possible in the new year”. 

Corbyn thus walked into the same trap as Rebecca Long-Bailey, the Corbynite continuity candidate for the leadership, who seemingly failed to understand the “zero” in “zero tolerance of antisemitism” and was sacked as shadow education secretary. Starmer the lawyer allowed them both to put themselves on the wrong side of the line and simply followed due process. 

Thus those awkward questions that Starmer dodged at his news conference have been superseded. The abruptness with which he explained why he had stayed in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet when he knew that the party was tolerating antisemitism has been forgotten. The question of whether Corbyn should or should not be expelled from the party is no longer one for him. He would probably rather the independent procedure avoided providing a martyrdom tale that would energise Momentum members, who have been quiescent since the election. 

Much better, from Starmer’s point of view, to allow the Corbynites to continue to discredit themselves. So far, they have been doing an outstanding job. Before Corbyn stood down as leader, a report was commissioned for Jennie Formby, the outgoing general secretary, which tried to suggest that “Blairites” on the party staff had obstructed attempts to deal with antisemitism in order to make Corbyn look bad. In other words, that antisemitism was a serious problem, but the leader was weak. 

The EHRC deals rather crisply with this report, which was leaked to the media rather than provided to the EHRC investigators, and implies that some of the people in Corbyn’s office were neither prompt nor forthcoming in cooperating with them. 

None of which can in any case distract from the fundamental point, which is that the stain of antisemitism was caused by a blind spot in Corbyn’s politics. That problem has been dealt with at source. Everything else is secondary. Many of the remaining questions are important, but they are not the main thing. 

Now that Corbyn is not the leader, the problem will fade. Corbyn’s decision to force Starmer to suspend him will accelerate that change, but it will take some time before the damage that was done to the good name of the Labour Party can be restored.