by Keir Starmer, Jewish Chronicle
This week marks five years since the dark day when the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) found that the Labour Party under its previous leadership had broken equality law and discriminated against our Jewish members.
This was a truly shameful day for our movement. As I reflect upon this chapter on this anniversary, on behalf of the whole Labour Party, I apologise once more that this could ever have been allowed to happen.
In order to begin the process of trying to regain the trust of the Jewish community, it was our moral duty as a party to do everything in our power to tear out antisemitism by its roots wherever we found it in our ranks.
That moral duty is why I as leader of the party accepted and then implemented the EHRC’s action plan in full, without any qualification or hesitation. And when Jeremy Corbyn rejected the report’s clear conclusions of unlawful discrimination having taken place under his leadership of the party, the Labour whip was immediately withdrawn and he was rightly not allowed to stand as a Labour candidate again. If we were to prove that the Labour Party was serious about changing there had to both be zero tolerance of the evil of antisemitism and zero tolerance of any attempt to downplay what had happened in our party. So that is what we did, and now we have made it clear that this denialism is unacceptable in our party. Although it still lurks in our politics and in the corridors of power. We will continue to do all we can to root it out of society.