The equality watchdog’s indictment of the party under its previous leader should have prompted a period of reflection
The catharsis lasted all of three hours. From 10am on Thursday morning until lunchtime, British Jews were allowed to feel a small measure of relief: after nearly five years of being dismissed as liars and dissemblers, deceitfully engaged in an elaborate smear campaign, a neutral legal arbiter had ruled that those who had sounded the alarm about antisemitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party were, after all, telling the truth.
Yet the pause for reflection that so many had hoped for expired before it had really begun. It was overtaken by word that Labour had suspended Corbyn for suggesting that the whole business had been “dramatically overstated”. The planned period of introspection was postponed, as the focus switched instead to the relative strengths of the new leader against the old and the prospect of a Labour civil war. The party’s treatment of Jews was no longer the issue of the moment.
