JLM’s role getting Labour into a state fit to govern should not be forgotten

In fact, it wasn’t just the seats in the Staffordshire city that they did it in: Labour were victorious in once safe-Tory strongholds like Aldershot and South West Norfolk (Liz Truss’s former seat) that even the most dyed-in-the-wool activist never imagined they’d now have MPs representing.

The contrast from 2019 couldn’t be starker, where Stoke saw a particularly painful defeat for Labour’s Jewish members.

Ruth Smeeth (now Baroness Anderson) – who fought tooth and nail against antisemitism within the party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn – was swept away in Boris Johnson’s takeover of Labour’s “red wall” former industrial heartlands.

The dark days for Jewish party member will never be forgotten, but as well as celebrating their party’s recent electoral triumph, they have additional reason to be cheerful: former Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) national secretary Peter Mason was voted onto the governing body of the Labour Party, the National Executive Committee (NEC) just before conference.

The change from the Corbyn years – demanding that concerns over antisemitism be heard by party officials – to literally having one of the people who made those demands elected to the decision-making table isn’t lost on some.

The scale of Starmer’s victory in 2024 has led some commentators assume that the party’s return to Downing Street was inevitable.

But had JLM not stayed and sought to fight for the soul of their party – let alone their place within it – the party may have been remained confined to the wilderness for much longer.

A quick search of the JC’s archive of articles from the Corbyn era shows quite how the party has changed.

In 2019 Luciana Berger, once considered a rising star in the party, quit and called Labour “institutionally antisemitic”.

Mike Katz, national chair of JLM, described the atmosphere at the time as filled with “fatalism and pessimism about the future of the party.”

“A lot of MPs either didn’t get antisemitism – or they did but were too scared to speak up about it in a meaningful way, because of pressure from local lefties, or threats from the leadership,” he said.

JLM’s near 100-year link to the Labour Party came close to being broken and the group balloted members on disaffiliating from the party – angry at how bad things had become under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

One former JLM official told the JC: “There was a really real feeling we might be approaching the end of the track as one of Labour’s oldest affiliated organisations.”

However, they also said that members voted to remain linked to the party because they “believed we needed to use our position to turn the tide on antisemitism, and that if we stepped away, we’d be vacating an incredibly important place.”

This was echoed by Katz as to why JLM didn’t follow Berger out of Labour and instead stayed and fought: “We didn’t think quitting was the long-term answer, it would have made a good headline for a day, but we preferred to be a tent-pole around which people of our view within the party could organise.”

The organising against Corbyn and his allies wasn’t something JLM did on their own.

Luke Akehurst, now MP for North Durham, was then secretary of Labour First, a factional grouping that organised against Corbyn’s wing of the party and left-wing faction Momentum.

Together with other moderate groups like Progress (now Progressive Britain) they vocally opposed the antisemitism in Labour that JLM had been calling out.

Akehurst told the JC that it was “unbelievable that the party reached such a moral quagmire that an organisation with a 100 year link to it had to consider whether it want wanted to be a part of it.”

David Taylor, now MP for Hemel Hempstead, the founder of Labour Campaign for International Development (LCID) – a socialist society affiliated to Labour like JLM – told the JC there was “no doubt JLM played a pivotal role in making sure antisemitism was taken seriously during the Corbyn years.”

He continued: “Like a lot of people, I was disgusted by the antisemitism that existed under Corbyn. I came close to leaving the party, but instead decided to stay and organise to help take our party back … We always tried to act in solidarity with JLM, because morally it was the right thing to do”.

JLM ended up reporting the party to Britain’s equalities watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).

Katz told the JC this was due to “a culmination of events through the year that made us realise that the party under Corbyn was unable and unwilling to police itself properly.”

These included the NEC spending a series of meetings debating whether to agree to endorse the internationally-recognised IHRA definition of antisemitism, which even saw Corbyn personally turn up and try and make up his own definition. Katz continued: “We’d given Corbyn and his team more than enough chances.”

When Sir Keir Starmer took over from Corbyn as Labour leader in the Covid lockdown of April 2020, he apologised for antisemitism within the party in his first speech.

This came as a surprise to some in the community, given the broad appeal of Starmer’s leadership campaign – characterised by some as trying to be like “corbynism without Corbyn” – and the fact he had loyally served the Islington North MP in the high-profile role of shadow Brexit secretary in his shadow cabinet.

A former JLM official said members were “incredibly apprehensive about what would come next” during the labour leadership election to succeed Corbyn.

Indeed, JLM members weren’t totally convinced by Starmer and voted to endorse his leadership rival Lisa Nandy who had refused a place in Corbyn’s frontbench.

But Starmer’s intervention didn’t surprise Mike Katz: “People in his campaign team like Morgan McSweeny [now his head of political strategy] understood the much wider political resonance around making a reference to it as well as is being the right thing to do.”

He went on: “The 2019 general election was about two issues: Brexit and antisemitism.

“People in Barnet understood antisemitism; people in Blyth Valley had probably never met a Jew, but knew antisemitism was bad and if Corbyn couldn’t even sort his party out then how on earth could he sort out the big issues the country faced?”

Starmer’s warm words were quickly backed up by action as he sacked corbynite leadership rival Rebecca Long-Bailey from the frontbench for praising an interview with Maxine Peake in which the left-wing actress shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

He also booted Corbyn out of the parliamentary party for refusing to accept the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)’s report into antisemitism in Labour and refused to admit him back into the party at the most recent general election, which saw him elected as an independent.

As well as the headline-grabbing incidents, there was also much behind-the-scenes activity that Starmer took when he was elected Labour leader. A former JLM official told the JC: “There was an immense amount of time, effort and resources that was directed within the Labour Party” into ridding it of antisemitism. They expanded: “From creating a whole new complaints process, implementing training and showing real leadership from top down. JLM was absolutely central in delivering this, we developed a really close relationship with Labour’s top team as they trusted us and understood how important tackling antisemitism would be to show that the party had changed.”

That’s not to say everything has been perfect. Labour was criticised for being slow to take action against their candidate in the Rochdale by-election who claimed Israel “allowed” the October 7 attacks to happen to get a “green light to do whatever they bloody want”; they eventually withdrew support for him after further comments about Jews who worked for the media came to light. The accusation from some was that the party didn’t take speedy action because he was factionally aligned with Starmer.

In office, the prime minister’s relationship with Jewish communal organisations hasn’t been totally rosy and his decision to suspend some arms sales to Israel was widely criticised.

But without JLM forcing the party to deal with antisemitism, and without Starmer dealing with it in a way that saw the party taken out of EHRC special measures in 2023, there may have been no Labour government to criticise.

According to Luke Akehurst: “Without JLM bringing a cogent case to the EHRC there would have been no investigation, no report, no recommendations and no clear pathway out of the crisis.”

David Taylor said that being seen to deal with antisemitism was essential to winning the trust of ordinary voters: “we had become a nasty party and the public recognised that and wouldn’t have put our trust in us again.”

But more poignantly he added that “from a moral point of view, we would have had no right to be elected to government before we’d taken serious action to address antisemitism and transform our party, as Keir did.”

Despite the fanfare of the party faithful, Labour’s conference has been overshadowed by stories of Starmer’s advisers rowing and allegations of sleaze amid controversial headlines over Labour frontbenchers accepting gifts.

Not exactly the set piece to launch their time in office that they would have hoped for.

Their transformation was no guarantee that Labour will be any good at governing.

But activists celebrating being back in office should raise their glasses to JLM, without whom it may not have been possible.