This was the year in which a Jewish Labour MP stood on a stage, surrounded by colleagues, and said that she was leaving the party because it was institutionally antisemitic.
It was the year of the Panorama documentary into Labour antisemitism and the whistleblowers, formerly of the party’s compliance unit, who came forward to describe what they had seen.
It was a year in which a Labour MP with a long history of Jew-baiting finally took what was seen as a step too far. It was a year in which this country’s Chief Rabbi broke a long-standing precedent by urging all citizens to consider whether a vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour would be wise.
But at the start of the year, Mr Corbyn appeared — despite all that had happened in the previous 12 months — to be riding high.
There was no indication that he would be going anywhere anytime soon. With Theresa May appearing to struggle to put together a Brexit deal which would prove acceptable both to the EU and to British Leave supporters, it seemed as if all he needed to do was wait.
In the meantime, however, the Labour Party was not waiting to let back in highly questionable characters who had previously been suspended.
Returnees in January included a councillor who had claimed that the UK’s Jewish newspapers had colluded with Mossad (as if Mossad don’t have anything better to do); a Welsh Assembly member who had appeared to criticise a local synagogue for its security and described them as having a “siege mentality”; and a former MP who said he had lost “respect and empathy for the Jewish community and their historic suffering... due to what they and their Blairite plotters are doing to my party”.
The situation was to continue throughout the year — in June, that former MP, Jim Sheridan, was made deputy leader of the local Labour Party.
But Labour did not just have a problem of letting people back in; it became increasingly apparent that it had rejected complaints against members who had shared egregious examples of antisemitism.
An example which was to become emblematic was that of a Labour activist who had shared an image from a far right blog showing a parasitic creature with a Star of David on it, covering the face of the Statue of Liberty.
It would turn out that the complaint had been rejected, so the “logic” went, because she could have been referring to Israel rather than Jews.
February saw the first major cracks in the Corbyn project. Seven MPs resigned from the Labour Party to form the Independent Group.
Among them was Luciana Berger, MP for Liverpool Wavertree.
Less than a year before, at the Enough is Enough rally held outside Westminster, she had urged protesters to join Labour and lead the fight against antisemitism from the inside. But the abuse she had received since then, the threats which meant she received police protection at Labour’s party conference, and the total lack of sympathy from the Labour leadership, led to her concluding that the party was institutionally antisemitic.
She would later join the Liberal Democrats, announcing her intention to contest the seat of Finchley & Golders Green, the constituency with the highest percentage of Jewish voters in the UK, at the next election.
A few weeks later, in March, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) announced it was beginning pre-enforcement proceedings into the Labour Party after groups including the Jewish Labour Movement submitted dossiers of evidence regarding the behaviour of those at all levels of the party.
In late May, the EHRC launched a formal investigation and Labour became the second political party — after the far right British National Party — to be investigated for institutional racism.
Meanwhile, there had been a great deal of anger at the activities of Chris Williamson, the Labour MP for Derby North, for, among other things, his repeated dismissal of Labour’s antisemitism problem and his full-throated defence of numerous highly problematic individuals.
On a visit to Mr Williamson’s constituency in early February, Mr Corbyn had defended him, saying “he’s a strong anti-racist campaigner and not antisemitic in any way”.
A couple of weeks later, video footage was released of Mr Williamson speaking to activists of the far-left Momentum group in Sheffield; in his speech, he described how he thought Labour had been “too apologetic” on antisemitism.
In the resultant uproar, he was finally suspended from the party, a step the JLM had been asking Labour to take for years.
The revelations continued to emerge, every single week.
That John Prescott, former Deputy Leader of the party, had ranted at a Jewish journalist who had asked him about Labour antisemitism that “all of this is about Israel… dead children.. settlers on someone else’s land”.
That Jeremy Corbyn had described the removal from the UK of a Palestinian cleric who had promoted the blood libel as being down to “the Zionist lobby”.
That Richard Burgon, a member of the Shadow Cabinet, had in fact described Zionism as “the enemy of peace” despite having denied it when asked on television.
That a Labour member in the constituency of High Peaks had shared neo-Nazi material, was still embraced by the local MP and constituency party and was subsequently elected a local councillor.
That Labour’s candidate for the Peterborough by-election had endorsed social media posts describing the Prime Minister’s “Zionist slave masters” and claiming that Isis was created by the CIA and Mossad. The list would go on and on.
In June, to widespread fury, Mr Williamson was let back into the party by a three member panel of Labour’s National Executive Committee. One of those who had voted to let him back in, Huda Elmi, had previously called for the EHRC to be disbanded after it announced its investigation into the party. Forty-eight hours later, Mr Williamson had been re-suspended, after more than 100 Labour MPs and Peers wrote publicly denouncing the decision to let him back in.
There had been rumblings for a while about a TV programme set to expose some of the internal goings on within Labour. In July, that programme was aired: a BBC Panorama investigation which featured a number of former employees of the party’s complaints unit, whistleblowers who had decided to break non-disclosure agreements to reveal what they had seen.
Person after person, many of whom had voted for Mr Corbyn to become Labour leader, described the toxic nature of the material they had seen and how higher-ups sought to tamper with the complaints process.
The official response from Labour was to attack all those who had come forward, as well as the BBC itself. Others, however, were horrified. More than 100 Labour peers took out a full page ad in the Guardian accusing Mr Corbyn of “presiding over the most shameful period in Labour’s history”.
Faced with this, in late July Mr Corbyn finally released a video admitting that “a small number of members” held antisemitic views. But this was seen as little more as being yet another attempt to try and downplay the problem.
While the attention of the Jewish community was very much focused on Labour’s antisemitism issues, we were hardly ignoring other political developments.
Having been granted a Brexit extension by the EU, the Prime Minister, Theresa May resigned after being unable, despite repeated efforts, to muster a majority in the House of Commons for any Brexit deal.
After a short leadership race, she was succeeded by Boris Johnson — but Parliament remained intransigent, with proposal after proposal on the form of Brexit to take being voted down.
However, Conservative MPs who voted against the government’s proposals were now stripped of the party whip, including Oliver Letwin, the Jewish MP for West Dorset. He announced that he would not be standing at the next election, widely assumed to be a matter of months away.
Dozens of other MPs, from all sides of the house, also gave notice of their intent to stand down as MPs, including other Jewish parliamentarians like Richard Harrington and Louise Ellman, and long-time friends of the community such as Ian Austin, Joan Ryan and John Mann. Mr Mann (now Lord) was subsequently given a peerage, and is now the government’s independent adviser on antisemitism.
In late October, with another Brexit extension having been agreed with the EU, a general election was called for December.
A number of candidates selected by Labour were chosen regardless of their past statements. For example, Apsana Begum was selected as Labour’s candidate for Poplar & Limehouse, despite having shared material suggesting that Saudi Arabia had been “inspired by their Zionist masters”.
Another, Zarah Sultana, had previously taunted an outgoing non-Jewish National Union of Students official who had spoken out against campus antisemitism and BDS motions, telling him that he “didn’t serve Israel as well as you would have liked”.
Labour was not the only party with candidates who had expressed awful views. The Conservatives withdrew their backing for a candidate who claimed that British Jews returned from Israel as “brainwashed extremists”, and another alleged to have made antisemitic comments about the Holocaust.
The Liberal Democrats kicked out a candidate who claimed that WhatsApp was “Zionist backed” and had shared virulently antisemitic cartoons. The SNP, Greens and Plaid Cymru were also found to have prominent members who had shared similarly troubling views.
But Labour’s problem was by far and away the most egregious, due in no small part to the long history of its leader.
A Reform Rabbi, Jonathan Romain, urged his congregants not to vote for Labour. But it was the Chief Rabbi’s comments a few weeks later, in a similar vein, which made front page headlines.
In an unprecedented fashion, Rabbi Mirvis described claims by Mr Corbyn that Labour had investigated all cases of antisemitism as a “mendacious fiction”. While stressing that it was not his place to tell anyone how to vote, he wondered “how complicit would a leader of Her Majesty’s opposition have to be in order to be considered unfit for high office?
“Would associations with those who have openly incited hatred against Jews be enough? Would support for a racist mural, depicting powerful hook-nosed Jews supposedly getting rich at the expense of the rich and downtrodden, be enough? Would describing as ‘friends’ those who endorse and even perpetrate the murder of Jews be enough? It seems not.”
Days before the election, further proof of the seriousness of Labour’s problem was revealed. A submission from the JLM to the EHRC was leaked, showing horrendous examples of antisemitism over 53 pages, including the targeting of Jewish members and MPs.
But it was far from clear what the result of the election would be. At 10pm on Thursday December 12, the official exit poll revealed the first indication of the actual result. It was catastrophic for Labour, showing the Conservatives on course for an 80-seat majority. As the night went on, it became clear that the exit poll was accurate — and that after four and a half long years, Mr Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party would soon be coming to an end. Up in Stoke-on-Trent North, one of Labour’s last valiant Jewish female MPs lost her seat. Ruth Smeeth, who had become Parliamentary Chair of the JLM after Ms Berger left the party, was defeated.
And in Finchley and Golders Green, a spirited bid by Ms Berger to take the seat was defeated by Mike Freer, the Conservative incumbent.
It was noted, including by Ms Berger herself, that an email had been sent out by Labour activists in Mr Corbyn’s name as Election Day dawned urging them to campaign in the constituency on behalf of the Labour candidate. Was this a last-ditch deliberate attempt to hurt the chances of an outspoken opponent of his? We may never know for sure.
As we enter the second decade of this century, Brexit lies in the immediate future. Our new deadline for leaving is the end of January, and the Prime Minister now has the Parliamentary votes to back a deal.
We might also hope for a Labour leadership election which does not shy away from the antisemitism issue. It is unlikely they will be able to forget about it, given the planned release of the EHRC’s judgment some time in 2020.
Daniel Sugarman is Public Affairs Officer at the Board of Deputies
