We are the Opposition ✊#GrassrootsVoice

Hi Danny. Have you read my book? Have you engaged with its content at all? I ask because you don't appear to engage with the substance of my post. I'd be happy to send you a copy. I'd also be happy to come into Times Radio, again, to explain my position - and maybe you'd like to reflect on why the Labour Party and the likes of Morgan McSweeney were so desperate to kill my book that they went after my friends, colleagues and family - after working with your colleagues at the Sunday Times! I believe you've misrepresented and misunderstood my argument and my work. My "preoccupation" is not with the idea that Labour took antisemitism too seriously and dedicated undue resources to it and that Jews are given "special status." My "preoccupation", throughout my career, which extends long before investigating the Labour Party, is political corruption and the abuse of power. My "preoccupation" in my book is understanding how the tiny Labour Together faction used unlawful means to capture the Labour Party and then the state, and the damage they've done to democracy as a result. My "preoccupation" is understanding how that faction achieved power and how they wielded it, which included cynically using antisemitism in contemporaneously undisclosed dark arts campaigns to destroy a political project it could not defeat openly. Your colleagues Pogrund and Maguire called McSweeney's campaign an act of unparalleled sabotage, based on systematic dishonesty, which is incontrovertible on the evidence. Importantly, the central players in these campaigns were not Jewish. It was people like Steve Reed, Morgan McSweeney, Imran Ahmed. None of the "brave eight" Labour MPs were Jewish - Reed, Philipson, Powell, Cruddas, Mahmood, Streeting, Reeves and McMahon. My "preoccupation" is understanding the consequences that flowed from the factional uses of antisemitism. Three are notable here. First, the Party systematically harassed and expelled left-wing Jews. I tell the story, for example, of how the Party investigated Riva Joffe, a lifelong antiracist campaigner, on her literal deathbed - because of a Facebook post advertising an Israel-Apartheid week event at a university. The second is that the Party adopted a position of prophylactic deference to Israel even as it was clear that Israel was going to commit vast war crimes in Gaza. The third is that the Party effectively stigmatised pro-Palestinian solidarity as Jew hate, and, in power, used the state to hugely constrain and curtail the rights of protest. My "preoccupation" with this report is that it's really, really bad. Not "bad" as in unwise, but slapdash. Bad data, basic errors of fact, crazy recommendations that don't even follow from the bad data - all smacking of an effort to reach pre-determimed outcomes for political reasons. The question is why aren't you angry? Why isn't the scandal that this government has overseen and accepted a report on a profound and serious issue whose drafters took three months to produce slop that can be shot apart in hours? Why aren't you angry that this report is so stupid and so inflammatory that the NEU has already come out against it? I have a school age child. I am friends with many Jewish parents with kids at the school. Some are Zionist, some are anti-Zionist. Some don't care about Israel and want to talk about Strictly and PS5 games. As a result of this report, my child's school is going to be pressured into accepting the IHRA Definition, which effectively declares Jewish parents and children antisemitic for their antizionism. There are Palestinian parents at the school. They will likely be told they can't wear a watermelon pin or the flag of Palestine when they drop their kids at school. I can't see how this isn't going to create serious upset - and real chaos - at the school. This is going to happen IN EVERY SCHOOL in the country. How can you not see that this is going to make it so much harder to tackle antisemitism?

This whole exchange with Owen Jones really is very poor considering that this is the Chief Political commentator in the FT. Its particularly insulting if you know the context of how the phrase "hierarchy of racism" gained currency on the broader Labour-ish left in the UK. I think it betrays a real ignorance of a long and storied topic. So some history... The term "hierarchy of racism" was most prominently included in the Forde Report. The Report was the result of an investigation headed by Martin Forde KC, a well-respected black barrister with a long history in tackling issues like the Windrush scandal. Forde'sc investigation was supported by a panel of grandee appointed by the Labour Party NEC - the likes of Baroness Ruth Lister, so hardly a bevy of radicals. Forde was tasked with investigating a series of issues filtering the released of the "Leaked Report." Very very very long story short, Forde was asked to investigate how issues of racism, antisemitism, hyper-factionalism and misconduct intertwined in the vicious battle for the Labour Party in the Corbyn years. Forde ended his report (endorsed by all the other members of the Forde Committee) by noting that some staff believed that there was a "perception" of a "hierarchy of racism" in the Labour Party, with antisemitism treated more seriously and given more time than other forms of discrimination. The Party's own response to Forde confirmed, over and over, that Forde was right. Indeed, the Party treated Forde disgracefully. He was briefed against in the media. He was blocked from speaking to the Committee convened to consider the report and its recommendations. When he became concerned his report was not being taken seriously, he gave an interview to the media - and the Party, outrageously, tried to gag him with legal threats. There are many ugly stories in The Fraud, but it still fills me with fury to think about how atrociously the Starmer and the McSweeney project treated Forde. Most people think Forde was thrown under the bus because he called out right-wing factionalism. But the real "sin" of the Forde Report was that it criticised the Party's antisemitism training delivered by the (pro-Israel) Jewish Labour Movement for being top-down, didactic and limited (a comment made by another member of his committee who insisted it be included - not Forde himself, although most people don't know that). The Report suggested that an anti-Zionist group, JVL, be allowed to deliver training to complement the JLM training. And for this Forde was ridiculed. Numerous commentators, including one from JLM, wrote articles attacking the Forde Report, accusing Forde straying into places he was not supposed to go. By 2025, Forde had changed his tune. He said the there wasn't a "perception" of a hierarchy of racism in Labour - it simply just did operate a hierarchy of racism in how seriously it treated different types of discrimination, and had disgraced itself by how often it had mistreated prominent black and brown politicians like Diane Abbott and Apsama Begum. Really, the examples of the hierarchy are overwhelming. I write in the Fraud of how Starmer's team directly intervened in antisemitism complaints handling to kick out members accused - often wrongly - of antisemitism. It brought in new, deeply unfair rules like retrospective proscription as a mechanism to expel individuals like Ken Loach who could never be found guilty of antisemitism but were still unpalatable to Jewish communal organisations. It was through this mechanism that huge numbers of Jewish members were eventually expelled. Compare that to when the conflict in Gaza begins. Dozens of Muslim councillors resign in fury. An unnamed senior source says Labour is "shaking off the fleas." The Labour Muslim Network (LMN) writes to the leadership asking for a meeting and a way forward to address wide-spread anger. The response? Morgan McSweeney texts a WhatsApp group that LMN are not good faith actors. /1