As the kind of person who says sorry when someone bumps into me, it is my experience that one of the most common things people do really badly is apologise. We say sorry when it is not needed and not when it is; we really get it wrong when we say it under duress, or don’t really understand what we are saying it for.

There is a reason there are so many pages online devoted to executing the perfect apology. And most of us can probably count on one hand the amount of times we have been on the receiving end of one.

Last year, Jeremy Corbyn was asked to apologise for his 2020 statement that claims of antisemitism under his leadership had been “dramatically overstated”. When he refused, Sir Keir Starmer removed the whip. Last week he banned him from standing for the party.

One former senior official argued afterwards that Corbyn’s response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report had been “spot on” and was “misrepresented in the media and by critics”. Corbyn’s supporters have been adamant that he offered an appropriate apology.

Here’s what Corbyn said: “One antisemite is one too many, but 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. That combination hurt Jewish people and must never be repeated.”

Let’s look at that last line, the supposition that it was a combination of some racism and media exaggeration of it that equally hurt Jews.

Spoken word performer and campaigner Marlon Solomon points out: “Antisemitism made headlines for a few days in April 2016, after the ex-mayor of London claimed that the greatest antisemite of all time was in favour of Jewish emancipation.” There was then “scattered coverage” around the launch of the Chakrabarti report (at which Corbyn himself seemed to make a clumsy comparison between Israel and Isis) and the 2017 party conference.
In reality, not much appeared in the national press until 2018. During those years, it was only papers like the JC which covered what was happening in detail.

I remember it all too well, as will my colleagues during that time. Social media posts devoted to the Labour leader were littered with antisemitism so blatant there was no need for dogs to hear any whistle. The JC newsdesk took calls daily from people in desperation, lifelong Labour members who were being hounded out of local groups and young people who were being ostracised by their university peers, pushed to denounce Israel’s latest perceived crime on account of their Jewish identity alone.

So uninterested was the media that we ran reports documenting the mental health impact on people who were so horrified by the lack of wider interest that they were spending hour after hour in antisemitic Facebook groups, recording and documenting racism in the hope that someone might pay attention. Even today, I don’t think we can say that we fully understand, let alone appreciate, the effect those years had on people. To say it destroyed people’s lives as they had previously lived them is no exaggeration.

People lost their jobs and friends, and the social and political frameworks in which they had built their lives abandoned them. One of Labour’s most prominent female Jewish politicians needed police protection at the party’s conference. And the party failed to notify her about threats that were the subject of a police investigation.

You can roll your eyes at all this and call it “boring,” as one commentator did on TV last week, and you can claim that people felt those things because the media made them up; or you can have some respect for the appalling things your fellow human beings went through.

People like the Labour councillor who told me his dream of one day working for the party had “been shattered” and how “it often feels like years or decades of your life have been wasted”. He was subjected to “abuse and ridicule” from fellow Labour members and felt as if the Labour leadership was mocking Jewish members with “statements denying antisemitism”. Another Labour member described feeling like “being Jewish has been stolen from me.”

These were no media exaggerations. The idea that, when it came, the eventual coverage of the antisemitism and trauma people were experiencing was as hurtful to Jewish people as the abuse itself is a disgraceful fiction.

So, in the absence of a real apology from Corbyn, Starmer’s decision last week will have to do.