The Corbynite leadership’s final, scorched-earth, rearguard action

It was all going so well: but a matter of days following the election of Keir Starmer as Labour’s new leader and it is convulsing itself over the scandal of a report, leaked widely, containing sensitive, personal information and also making serious allegations about current and past staffers, not to mention various members and non-members.

It has the makings of a PR disaster of epic proportions which, thanks to Covid-19, national media has not yet given the prominence it is likely to have in future. But it will: make no mistake about its seriousness. It could even bankrupt the party, or some of its individual figures.

Corbyn himself is gone, of course. But this week we discovered, not to much surprise, that the report was commissioned by his last lieutenant: the party’s General Secretary, Jennie Formby.

You do not have to agree that Formby created a climate of fear and bullying at Labour HQ; or that she allowed unresolved anti-Semitism complaints to balloon on her watch and then disingenuously blamed the problem on her predecessor, although there is ample evidence for both these things. But they are opinions.

Where one has to despair with some party members over recent days, in uproar on Labour’s social media echo chamber, is the wilful blindness to the following actual facts:

1. Spying on staff is not ok. Honestly, what is wrong with you people, that you think it’s fine for any organisation to spy on its staff on an industrial scale, compiling their emails and WhatsApps, whatever the nature of their comments turned out to be?If you go into pretty much any organisation in the world, you will find groups of people being rude about their bosses and colleagues on email, chat or text, in a private way: this is human nature. Most of them quite reasonably do not expect they are about to be spied on by their employer. Even if use of information extracted from such monitoring is legal under certain, specific circumstances, it is clearly not behaviour which would be calmly accepted by a workforce as a rule and rightly so.

With that one action, Formby has destroyed the trust of hundreds of people employed by the party and using its email or mobiles on a daily basis. She surely cannot continue long in her role now, for purely managerial reasons – she has clearly lost confidence of her staff.

2. A major data breach has been committed. Are we really saying that Jennie Formby, who commissioned a report she knew contained highly sensitive and personal information, should not be held responsible for its safekeeping?

And how could she realistically not have known that such a sensitive document could not possibly be kept secret in a million years, given the controversial nature of its contents?It is all very well, Ms Formby, to tell local party members not to distribute it, now you are personally implicated in a serious breach of the Data Protection Act. But your either malicious or incompetent handling of personal data has now left a number of people involved in current cases, including some minors and Jews, exposed and vulnerable.

It would have clearly have been better had this report never been compiled at all, for the damage it has done the party. For example, Uncut is aware of some Jewish former members whose personal details have now been posted on far-right websites, thanks to this idiotic report and letting it into the hands of numbskulls like Lloyd Russell-Moyle MP. You, as commissioner of the report and as the chief person responsible for the data contained within it, have to carry the can for all of this. The buck stops with you.

3. Non-independence of report. “The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014 – 2019”, does not read like an objective, formal report, despite its 800+ pages and pseudo-academic footnotes. Its authors were not named, for a start. And then the tone, which often reads like a Squawkbox editorial:“The result [of the 2015 leadership election] was seen as a triumph for Jeremy Corbyn, and a rout for the ‘Blairite’ politics of ‘Progress’, whose candidate acquired just 4.5% of the overall vote”.

Pretty objective stuff, eh? No, the simple reason that the party’s lawyers have not accepted the report into its submission to the EHRC on anti-Semitism is because it is an embarrassment. This is not any kind of independent report: it is a propaganda exercise by the last remnants of a dying order.

4. This is not whistleblowing. For those who have been disingenuously referring to the raising of personal grievances via this report as “whistleblowing”, the government is very clear about what constitutes whistleblowing, and it’s not this*.

While it slyly purports to explain the lack of action on anti-Semitism cases, the report liberally throws the blame at everyone except the current regime – surprise, surprise – and as a side order, ends up lobbing random smear grenades at a list of the enemies who have crossed it over the years. It is petty revenge, essentially to scorch the earth behind them: we are not going to have the Labour Party, but we are going to make damn sure that quite a few of you won’t, either.

Given the legal, regulatory and industrial action which will now ensue, from Data Commissioners, wronged individuals and staff unions, this story will run and run, be in no doubt.

But we should also note that the legal position of the General Secretary and the current regime managing the party is now very, very tricky indeed. With advent of GDPR legislation, privacy of personal data is taken very seriously indeed, and the owners of that data have a duty of care.

When the current froth settles, it is difficult to see how the current General Secretary comes out of this in any kind of tenable position. After the last week’s revelations about her people snooping on others’ emails, she will certainly not be missed by many of her staff.