If the Labour party is institutionally racist, it’s not how Chuka Umunna imagines it isOn 9 September, Chuka Umunna told Sophy Ridge of Sky News that the Labour party has become institutionally racist. “Part of the reason that I joined the Labour party”, said the MP for Streatham, “was because it was an anti-racist party.” But if Labour is an institutionally racist party, it’s not in the way Umunna thinks it is.
Antisemitism
Umunna claims that Labour’s failure to deal with antisemitism makes it institutionally racist. Antisemitism, of course, is a problem on the left – as it is across British society.
However, as Jeremy Corbyn wrote in the Guardian: “the number of cases [of antisemitism in the Labour party] over the past three years represents less than 0.1 per cent of Labour’s membership of more than half a million”. In August, Victoria Derbyshire demonstrated the numerous times that Corbyn has confronted these “pockets of antisemitism within Labour”.
Revealingly, Umunna argued this very point in 2016, within a report on antisemitism:
Some have suggested that there is institutional antisemitism across the whole of the Labour Party – this is not a view I share, not least because I have not seen one incident of antisemitism in almost 20 years of activism within my local Labour Party in Lambeth. However, we would be putting our heads in the sand if we denied the existence of antisemitism amongst a minority in our wider Labour family – this is something our movement has a solemn duty to root out if we are to remain true to the principles we were founded to promote and protect.
Umunna also supported “additional clarification” to the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism, in order “to ensure that freedom of speech is maintained in the context of discourse about Israel and Palestine”. By July 2018, however, Umunna was aggrieved that Labour had “not adopted the [IHRA] examples in full.”
The closer Corbyn gets to power, the more hysterical (and contradictory) the allegations against him become. Labour’s full adoption of the IHRA definition and examples has not, unsurprisingly, ended these attacks.
In the words of The Canary‘s Kerry-Anne Mendoza, it’s starting to look like “Labour centrists aren’t splitting over antisemitism, they’re splitting over socialism.”
Labour’s real problem with institutional racism
Umunna’s recent judgment on antisemitism within Lab..........
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/20 ... nes-it-is/