Sunday 3 March 2019

Beyond Zero Tolerance: Fixing Labour's Political Culture

Since 2015, the Labour Party's membership has more than doubled, bringing a whole new array of people into the party, with a wide variety of experience and previous political activity. This is overwhelmingly a positive thing. However, at the same time the political culture today is often disappointingly divisive and ill-tempered.

Much of this is inevitable. First, many of the new members joined in a particular political circumstance - around the leadership elections of 2015 and 2016 - and were met with a very negative reaction from many MPs, officials and the mass media. In these circumstances, a culture emerged at an early stage of new members (and old members on the left) being under attack and all engagement with activism and the rest of the movement was in the context of factional division.

At some point, concerns began to be expressed about the presence of antisemitism in some discourse within the party (and outside the party in the broader left). These concerns were not entirely new - there were controversies surrounding both Ken Livingstone and George Galloway from before this period, and some of Nick Cohen's argument in his polemic What's Left related to these issues too. For the most part, at this time, it was in relation to the language of pro-Palestinian activism, and also the presence or tolerance of individuals within pro-Palestinian activism who held antisemitic views. With the new influx of party members came another source of potential antisemitism - online conspiracy theory discourse, much of which focuses on mythology about "Rothschild bankers", etc.

The active and established left must take some responsibility for this: this is a discourse that crept back into radical, anti-establishment politics because of an absence of political education. Essentially, we left a vacuum for this stuff to blossom.

Of course, these are not the only negative aspects of the party and movement's political culture. As well as a minority of members using or sharing antisemitic discourse, a minority uses other forms of racist language and assumptions, there is homophobia and sexism. Indeed, we need to look at all of this with a broader view: the labour movement is in need of equalities training, just like any other organisation. We like to think we're better - because we should be better - but actually any organisation, and particularly a large organisation with a fast-changing membership, requires learning and development as a group.

And this is really where our political culture is a problem: not that we are "institutionally antisemitic" (we're not) but that we have a political culture that does not support learning and development. And we have a complaints and discipline process that is hard to make work fairly and justly, because of the extraordinary way in which it is made public.

Anyone who has delivered equalities training will tell you that one of the first things that you say in such training is "it's okay to make mistakes". The way to encourage learning and development on equalities issues is to welcome discussion - yes, to challenge but also to listen and to try to understand. At the moment, it isn't okay to make mistakes in the Labour Party. There is no such thing as a mistake. If someone uses language that someone else considers antisemitic, that person is an antisemite and if they are not expelled from the Labour Party that is evidence of institutional antisemitism. That is not a way to resolve the problem or to progress. And (fortunately!) it is not how we respond to other equalities issues.

Anyone who has worked as a union rep and helped individuals who are facing allegations and are subject to disciplinary proceedings know that this should be a confidential process (after all, the investigation may find in the accused's favour) and that outcomes could include verbal warnings that would be confidential and would not follow that person for the rest of their life. And remember, that the sorts of allegations that might be made within an organisation in the Labour Party does not just impact their political futures but could impact their reputation beyond politics and their ability to get a job, and the allegations can continue to have that impact whatever the outcome.

Not at all in a spirit of whataboutery, I will illustrate this with some real examples and some hypothetical situations in relation to other types of discrimination or prejudice.

I dislike the "gotcha" element of identifying those who "make mistakes" so I point out that my real examples are chosen not because I think the people in question should have been suspended or expelled, but because it was right that they weren't. Let's start with MP, Toby Perkins.

Toby responded to tweets by journalists George Eaton and Owen Jones agreeing with each other with "you make a lovely couple". The tweet was rightly called out as being homophobic and he tweeted a brief apology "yeah, probably not my finest moment, sorry..." But I wonder how Toby would have responded if he'd been suspended from the party and investigated and referred to as "a homophobe" rather than having said something homophobic? Obviously we don't know, but most people would become very defensive and feel they were being unfairly treated, pointing out how the criticisms might be politically-motivated and part of an agenda. And then how might those who might be considered to be part of the same political faction as Toby react if people further suggested that this was typical of their views? And that they should apologise for it?

Imagine we were canvassing and a voter blamed economic problems on "Eastern European immigrants". Would a sensible response be to call the voter a racist and say we hope they didn't vote for us? And then maybe to expose them on social media as a racist? Of course we wouldn't, whether they were a Labour Party member or not. We might want to discuss their views and try and persuade them of a different perspective.

It is not that we were wrong to say there should be zero tolerance. But what does it actually mean? There should be zero tolerance of discriminatory abuse - absolutely. Anyone engaging in that sort of thing has no place in the Labour Party. There should also be zero tolerance of discriminatory language, discourse and behaviour that is not in itself abusive, but here it is the language, discourse and behaviour for which there should be zero tolerance, not necessarily the person who uses it. Because it has to be okay to make mistakes and to learn from them.

So here's an alternative approach. And it's one that everyone needs to come on board with. First off, we need to begin with an assumption of good faith on all sides. Of course, starting from such a position, sometimes we will be disappointed. But if we can't at least start with that assumption, there's not much point to any of the rest of this. Next, we need to row back from a culture where people seek to catch people out. We roll out and promote equalities training for all members, but we stop seeing language and error (e.g. use of tropes and conspiratorial thinking) as disciplinary matters and instead see them as education and training matters, so that disciplinary processes can focus on abusive and clearly discriminatory behaviour. That the labour movement as a whole works to take the factionalism out of all of this and instead seeks to to ensure a) that victims are protected, and b) that everyone learns and develops together because we all have a lot to learn about each other if we are genuinely to do politics better.