How many antisemites in Labour? Facts not factionalism

JVL Introduction
We are seeing growing evidence calling into question the oft-repeated claim that antisemitic abuse was widespread in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
 
The idea that the Party was/ is overrun with antisemites not only conflicts with the lived experience of most Labour members – it is increasingly undermined by the facts. 
It is not a question of the existence of any antisemitism at all, but if and by how much it is or was more prevalent than elsewhere.  So how many Labour Party members were antisemites?

In order to try to answer that question, Dr Alan Maddison reviews the relevant statistical evidence.

(Please note this piece was corrected on April 2nd as an illustration had been repeated and one date was incorrect)

Inevitably antisemitism existed and exists in the Labour Party as it does in wider British society. There have been repeated claims though that antisemitism was very widespread amongst Labour members, especially supporters of Corbyn, and that manifestations were far more prevalent than in wider society, or in other political parties.

However, no credible statistical evidence has ever been presented to support the validity of such claims.

In this article we shall review related published statistics which could have a bearing on these serious allegations in terms of both prejudice and of manifestations relating to antisemitism in the Labour Party.

1. Prejudice

There exists no reliable quantitative evidence to support claims for prejudice relating to antisemitism being high amongst Labour members, nor more prevalent than elsewhere. In fact, no antisemitism surveys of Labour members have ever been published.

We can only examine indirect evidence in terms of the prevalence of left wing antisemitism from broader surveys of the British population.

The Jewish Policy Research group survey.

This was the largest British survey into antisemitism  ever undertaken and was published in 2017 by L Daniel Staetsky. He found that 5% of the British population was antisemitic, defined as disliking Jews, but that 30% had some varying levels of antisemitic prejudice which was not usually associated with any animosity towards Jews.

Staetsky explored prejudice patterns across the political spectrum for both groups as illustrated below.

Those endorsing five or more of eight ‘antisemitic’ statements were considered highly likely to dislike Jews and to represent the 5% ‘antisemites’. We can see in the lower curve that the proportion of such ‘antisemites’ was not significantly higher in groups on the political left, from where most Labour members come, or in the ‘very left-wing’ group where a minority are sourced.  Notably, there were 13% of ‘very right wingers’ in this category of ‘antisemites’, significantly more than in all other groups.

The upper curve represents those endorsing at least one of the eight statements, this relates to the 30%, and it followed a similar left to right pattern across the political spectrum.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism group surveys

In 2019 the CAA group changed methodology to produce a Report with a combined antisemitism index of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel prejudice, guided by the contested IHRA definition. This gave more weighting to anti-Israel sentiments and has been criticised (here) as deliberately misleading.

The CAA’s more reliable indices of ‘anti-Jewish views’ across the political spectrum are illustrated below.  They are much lower for ‘left-wing’ groups than those at the ‘centre’ or on the ‘right’. Once more the index was highest for the ‘very right-wing’ group.

In particular, we see that for strong supporters of Jeremy Corbyn  in the ’very left- wing’ group the index  (0.44) was slightly lower than for that of ‘very left-wingers’ in general (0.47).

Across the whole political spectrum the average index for strong supporters of Jeremy Corbyn (0.61) was lower than for the whole population (0.71). In contrast strong supporters of Boris Johnson had an index that was significantly higher (1.08).

Some have suggested there is a particular left-wing form of antisemitism. If this exists then statistically these surveys show that it does not seem to lead to any higher prevalence of antisemitism prejudice.

The more general notion of an influx of ‘left wing’ or ‘very left wing’ supporters of Jeremy Corbyn into the Labour Party giving rise to widespread antisemitism is clearly not supported by this data either.   

In summary, there is no credible statistical evidence to support the repeated claim that prejudices around antisemitism in members of the Labour Party are more widespread than elsewhere.

The statistics presented in the above surveys do not provide any indirect evidence to support such an assertion.

 2. Manifestations

There is again no reliable statistical evidence to support the claims that manifestations of ‘antisemitism’ were widespread in Labour’s ranks, or more prevalent than elsewhere.

Inquiries into Labour antisemitism

In June 2016 Shami Chakrabarti published the results of her Inquiry into manifestations of antisemitism and other forms of racism in the Labour Party. Whilst recognizing their existence, in a response to frequent claims in the media she reported that,

In October 2016 a cross-party Home Affairs Committee reported (here) on their inquiry into Antisemitism in the UK and concluded:   

 The above statement on media noise and the unjustified extrapolation of some ‘inappropriate social media comments’ to the whole Labour membership is still true today.

In April 2020 in the Internal Leaked Labour Report into Antisemitism  (LLR) the authors mention:

They considered that documented complaints simply reflected prejudice levels found in wider society.

In October 2020 the findings of findings of the EHRC Inquiry were published but have often been misrepresented. The EHRC did not investigate nor comment upon not the scale of any antisemitism in Labour’s membership.  They instead investigated how a selected 70 antisemitism complaints had been handled at Labour HQ. They did not find any evidence for ‘institutional antisemitism’ as claimed in the media.  They did report some unlawful ‘harassment’, but this only involved two individuals and both are challenging these allegations in the courts.

In July 2022 the Martin Forde Inquiry Report  into the LLR confirmed the authenticity of its findings, and that the generation of most complaints had been driven by anti-Corbyn factions. He condemned an unjustified hierarchy of racism where complaints from other minorities were not given the attention they deserved.

None of these inquiries has revealed evidence to support allegations of a uniquely widespread manifestation of antisemitism in the Labour Party.

Antisemitism complaint allegations handled by Labour HQ

The number of complaint investigations provides perhaps the most important statistics on the scale of manifestations of antisemitism by Labour members.

The Labour Party published complaint reports in February 2020  and  November 2022that show an estimated 1803 investigated antisemitism complaints over 5 years as illustrated below.

These involved a maximum of 0.37 % of Labour members over that time, so such manifestations could not be described as widespread.

It is unlikely that under-reporting by Jewish victims will have a significant impact on these figures; the Formby and LLR reports show the vast majority of complaints were generated by online factional trawls, often undertaken by anti-Corbyn non Jewish individuals inside and outside of Labour HQ.

No other members of a political party, or any other group for that matter, have been subjected to such intense and enduring factional online trawls by parts of their own staff and antagonistic outside groups. So there are no reliable comparable statistics to suggest Labour’s 0.37% would be higher than that expected elsewhere.

How many of the 1803 complaint incidents were motivated by antisemitism in terms of a dislike for Jews?

There is no reliable data on this.

The only statistics on the more serious complaints of antisemitism comes from details on 143 cases presented of around 1300 total reported in the LLR. Information on complaint categories are shown below.

These themes involved stereotypes adopted in up to 31% of British society and according to Staetsky’s data only a maximum of 5% will be motivated by a dislike for Jews. Where most of the 29  ‘Holocaust deniers’ are probably antisemites , this is likely to be true for only a minority for other minority of other themes.

Though of concern, this data does not provide evidence for a claimed high number of antisemites manifesting in the Labour Party, or more often than elsewhere for that matter.

The LLR also informs us that initially the bulk of complaints involved criticism of Israel, in fact ‘Palestine’ was one of the key search words used in the Labour HQ trawls. However, as Staetsky has shown, the 80-90% of critics of Israel are not antisemites. In addition, Chakrabarti stated in her report that the comments she was shown did not reflect any antisemitism, but were sometimes offensive and based on ignorance.

Later the LLR indicates that the anti-Corbyn factional trawl focus was on those precisely challenging the repeated claims of a uniquely widespread Labour antisemitism. Starmer and other anti-Corbyn groups seem to have disingenuously confused a challenge of the claimed scale of Labour’s antisemitism with the denial of the existence of any Labour antisemitism, and alleged it was therefore antisemitic. However the EHRC indicated that Labour members had every right to talk publicly of their opinions on this matter based on their own personal experience. Most of these comments were unlikely to be motivated by any animosity toward Jews and were probably simply a legitimate defence when faced with repeated and unjustified claims. These damaged the Party’s electoral ambitions, for which they invested so much effort for a fairer society.

It seems probable that only a minority of the 1803 complaints involved antisemites, but we have no reliable statistical data on this. However, there were an estimated 180 expulsions (0.037% of members) relating to antisemitism complaints submitted over these 5 years of exceptional factional scrutiny.

It is likely that these 0.037% expulsions will have included all the cases of investigated antisemites, though some may have previously resigned.

However, expelled members included a disportionate number  of Jewish members supporting Palestinian rights. In addition, like the veteran anti-racist Mark Wadsworth, for many the grounds of expulsion will not have been antisemitism, but the rather the vague ‘bringing the Party into disrepute’. This, in addition to the factional political targeting, indicates the 180 (0.037%) may be an over-estimate of the number of Labour’s antisemites manifesting over 5 years.

These 180 expulsions, 0.037% of 490 000 Labour members, is not evidence to support the claims of uniquely widespread manifestations of antisemites in Labour. There is no reliable comparison with any other groups under similar factional scrutiny.

Conclusion

There is no credible direct or indirect evidence to support the repeated claim of a uniquely widespread antisemitism in the Labour Party, either in terms of prejudice or related manifestations.

In other words there is no reliable statistical evidence to suggest that the number of antisemites in the Labour Party was any different to that found in a similar sized group in wider society. There is some indirect evidence that the number may in fact be lower.