Another scandal to be swept under the carpet!
Diane Abbott has called for the leaked Labour report that sparked allegations of anti-Black racism to be published in full.
This comes after the Guardian printed an article claiming the former staffers are now claiming the report contained misused private messages from their WhatsApp account.
The leaked 860-page report emerged in April, just after Keir Starmer became Labour leader, reigniting party splits by claiming that Corbyn’s chances of success were scuppered by disgruntled party elements.
Authored anonymously in the final months of Corbyn’s tenure, the report said opponents hampered his efforts to tackle antisemitism in the party and cited WhatsApp messages insulting Corbyn’s allies. Some of the messages had apparent racist or sexist overtones, prompting outrage among the party’s BAME members.
The Irony of these staffers claiming the messages were private is that these former staffers stand accused of creating a program that trawled through Labour Party members social media, the program hunting for keywords that would enable them to suspend or expel members, all done without any consideration for the member’s privacy.
The report even goes as far as to say they created what they called a ‘New Stasi’ system, this had a tool that could scrape twitter accounts looking for left-wing members they could suspend or expel from the Labour Party
As well as Twitter, staff specifically scraped Facebook with what was called “new stasi system”, that would record who were fans of particular pages and scrape Facebook comments from those pages.338 This was, again, specifically targeted at pages, such as “JeremyCorbyn4PM”, “Momentum” and “Young Greens”, that might catch people on the left saying anything remotely that they could use to remove the members from the Labour Party.
EXTRACT FROM THE LEAKED REPORT: 2.2.3. The “Validation” process. Extract from the Leaked Labour document:
“I’ll work on an experimental new Stasi system”
“James Schneider has [been flagged] but unfortunately it’s a bit benign” “fuck Momentum”
It was in this context that the Governance and Legal Unit led on a highly controversial operation to “vet” members and supporters by examining their social media feeds – a second round of 2015’s “Trot hunt”, officially called “Validation”.
At the time, the Nationbuilder software that Labour used to hold its member and supporter data had agreements with Facebook and Twitter that enabled it to “match” profiles, primarily through people’s email addresses.
At the end of June 2016, Richard Shakespeare, Labour’s lead developer, quickly produced a web app that would scrape Twitter and Facebook for tweets, retweets, shares and comments that matched various search criteria, and then match them to profiles of members and supporters, with a basic interface for staff to review the evidence and matches produced.
Though formally under Buckingham (who continued to work part-time), and despite having started in his role just days earlier, on 27 June 2016, Sam Matthews, newly appointed Compliance Officer was tasked with “co-ordinating this on a day-to-day Basis”.
He noted on 1 July that “the goal is… [to] investigate and refer as many as possible within the time scale we’ve got”.
The scale of the operation was deliberately hidden from the NEC, however – “we don’t want the NEC to have much of an idea how many there are to review (we’re worried they’ll get scared)”.
Matthews and Shakespeare discussed the need for secrecy, limiting what information people involved could see, and using people who could be “trusted”, with 10 people being recruited to work on this from Labour Students (two of whom were also noted as coming from “Britain Stronger In Europe”; there appears to have been some overlap between the two organisations)
Britain Stronger in Europe (formally The In Campaign Limited) was an advocacy group which campaigned in favour of the United Kingdom’s continued membership of the European Union in the 2016 British referendum.
Lord Peter Mandelson sat on the board on Britain Stronger IN Europe. He along with Roland Rudd another of Tony Blair’s advisers later setup the Corbyn–sceptic remain campaign pressure group ‘The People’s vote’
The key staff involved in this process openly opposed Jeremy Corbyn, and this process of “vetting” was designed to target the party’s left.
There is much much more in the leaked report, most damning is what appears to be a conspiracy to lose the 2017 general election.
The staffers claim that was“simply is not true”.
However after reading the Leaked report many people would come to a very different conclusion.
First duty of senior party officials is to support the Labour Party and support the Leader
— Claudia Webbe MP (@ClaudiaWebbe) August 7, 2020
Its how you win elections – had all of this happened we would now be in our third year of a Labour Government with Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister#LabourLeaks https://t.co/EtR4Dx9wpA