Labour Party Suspends Jeremy Corbyn Following the Publication of an Antisemitism Report

Keir Starmer has suspended his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, following the release of The Equality and Human Rights Commission's (EHRC) report stating that Labour had acted unlawfully.

In a press conference earlier today, Mr Starmer said "It is a day of shame for the Labour Party". He went on to say that there was no place for anyone anti-semitic or anyone who still believed that anti-semitism was exaggerated or a factional attack. Following these statements Conservatives started questioning why Mr Corbyn has not been removed from the party after having posted the following comments on his Facebook account only a couple of hours prior:

"The scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media."

Several hours after the press conference and his own statements, Mr Corbyn was suspended from the Labour party. He responded on twitter saying he would "strongly contest" the suspension and "continue to support a zero tolerance policy towards all forms of racism."

The EHRC report gave the Labour Party the recommendation of rolling out "A programme of education and training on identifying and tackling anti-semitism, for all staff, Party officials, and other members in positions of responsibility within the Party."

This followed the findings that political interference in the complaints process with special regard to complaints of anti-Semitism breached the Equality Act of 2010 as a form of indirect discrimination against Jewish members of the party.

The training program is to be developed with the assistance of senior Jewish party members. However the planning the training was delayed to accommodate "stakeholders, including the JLM, who for understandable reasons, are not willing to re-engage with the Party on the issue of training until after publication of our report."

The commission stated that the training program should be completed within six months and it will be "mandatory before any individual is allowed to be involved in any stage of the antisemitism complaints process."

The most prominent example of antisemitism listed in the report is Ken Livingstone, famously known for saying that "[Hitler] was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews".

The report lists other instances of comments deemed to be anti-Semitic in nature, such as the defences of Naz Shah's Facebook post that relocating Israel to the USA would be "problem solved" and that Labour MPs accusing him of anti-Semitism were "working for a foreign power".

Some of the more interesting cases of anti-Semitism came from regular members. One of these, which also received an informal warning, read:

"How can we not have empathy with the Palestinians when they are up against these murdering, Zionest [sic] bastards. Their NAZI masters taught them well"

Another member's social media posts were officially deemed to have: diminished the scale or significance of the Holocaust, expressed support for Hitler or the Nazis, and compared Israelis to Hitler or the Nazis.

It remains to be seen in the following months how Keith Starmer and his party proceed in dealing with this controversy and with the implementation of the penalty orders of the EHRC.